


A Hero of Our Time

by Minerva2020



Category: Even Stevens (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:00:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 29,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27314440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Minerva2020/pseuds/Minerva2020
Summary: Short novel based on Even Stevens, set in an alternate reality. Trigger warning for some graphic imagery.
Relationships: Tawny Dean/Louis Stevens





	1. Chapter 1

“Professor Dean?”

A familiar voice called out to Tawny as she locked the door of her office. She looked up and smiled, not taking long to recognize the only person who could be calling her like that.

“Mr. Stevens.” Tawny walked up to Louis and kissed him gently on the lips. “What brings you here today?” She held his hand in hers, which he then took with both of his. He delicately felt her hand, gently running his fingers across it until the matching rings on their fingers met. He looked somewhat hesitantly into her eyes and finally let his lips turn into his characteristically boyish smile, but not before having betrayed the look of consternation etched into his face.

“I came to pick you up, Tawny,” he finally said. “Shuttle service for my favorite comp lit scholar.” Tawny let out a slight chuckle as they began walking, their hands held. She clutched his hand tightly, taking in the feeling of delight that Louis could always make her feel as if for the first time. It was always the same voice, the same warmth, the same unmistakable touch she had come to know and love many years ago, back in much simpler times. Louis had changed so much since then, and yet it was somehow the same Louis who had made her fall in love with him, who had made her believe so much in someone like never before. Louis could make every step that they took together, every day of life on this earth, every breath of air feel like such a miracle. Just the fact that she was here, and that they were here, was proof enough.

They made their way in silence through the empty halls and toward the exit. The hallway had the familiar drab smell of nothing particular, with the slightest scent of cork and paperwork mixed in. The walls were pockmarked with bulletin boards that had most of the fliers ripped out, leaving behind only scraps of paper that left the casual passer-by guessing as to all the messages that hadn't reached their destinations. Oh, if only they knew, Tawny thought to herself. She could feel herself resisting the urge to just close her eyes and let some kind of automatism take over, as if her legs could start walking on their own and her mind could shut itself off from the reality around her. And the reality was that the two of them had come all this way to find themselves in a country on the verge of breaking point.

The last year or two almost felt like a blur. It was the kind of nightmare that kicked in just when the dreams felt so close to turning into reality, the dreams of all those years of activism ever since childhood. All those hours spent on picket lines, in general assemblies, in teach-ins, in editorial board meetings, and all it took was a few months to change everything. All it took was the right mix of civil strife, environmental catastrophe, gun violence, and false-flag operations for the president to invoke emergency powers and assume direct federal control over the state of California, promising to do “whatever it takes” to restore order. Just the right dose of confusion, shock, and the disorientation of not knowing what was genuine protest as opposed to manufactured provocation, civil resistance as opposed to anonymous terror. It was such an easy path to tyranny, as if staged straight out of a playbook, and yet everything about it was so real, all the ailments that had been eating away at this country for years and years on end now morphing into one giant, shapeless danger that couldn't just be debunked as easily as it could be invoked at will. It was all it took to bring the media into line, suppress activism on university campuses, denounce all dissent as unpatriotic and make nobody want to hear it. Neither the much-touted “two-thirds” that came out in every opinion poll in support of the government nor the passive minority that seemed determined to believe in the resilience of democratic institutions to the bitter end, certain that the emergency measures were only a passing anomaly.

Tawny let her eyes wander across the deserted campus as they walked out in the direction of the parking lot. The fact that she was here, and that they were here, was somehow all part of the same reality, one long chain of events. The same reality in which she had completed a PhD in just four years and gotten tenure before even turning 30, the same reality that felt like such a miracle with every step. A chain of events going back at least to 2003, the year she got together with Louis for good, but also the year the Iraq War started and pulled the country into the quagmire it still hadn't gotten out of. Even before then, she had been an activist with her one-person pickets and peace marches, back in much simpler times. She had been in this business for as long as she could remember, and now surely wasn't the time to hold back. She had bet on herself by applying for tenure after just four years, and the executive order that came into effect not much later with all the faculty turnover in the state universities that soon followed made it look like the best possible decision. It couldn't be clearer what had to be done in this situation. Up to a point, that is. She clutched Louis's hand more tightly, her thoughts now giving way to empty silence.

*

Tawny looked over to Louis as he drove, discreetly studying the look on his face. There was a look of blank intensity in his eyes, trying to focus on the road ahead. This was how Louis always was, all in. If he set his mind on something, there was nothing else he thought about, even if it was the same road they had taken back home so many times.

“Is something the matter, Louis?” Tawny finally asked, ever so calmly.

Louis didn't react at first, but his non-reaction already gave away the answer. “Another death threat came in,” he answered, just about maintaining the stoic evenness in his voice. This was already the fourth in the past month, one in each week. The surest reminder of the start of a new week was another anonymous threat in the mail.

Tawny turned and looked blankly out the windshield. “Well, what did it say?” she asked, almost nonchalantly.

Louis turned momentarily to meet her eyes, giving her a slightly incredulous look. “Don't you ever get afraid of anything?” he asked back, as gently as he could.

Tawny let out a sigh, trying to show him that she was taking this as seriously as he was. There used to be a time when she wasn't the one who felt the need to do this. Back in much simpler times.

“Well,” she began. “Was it addressed to me or both of us?”

A pained expression flashed across Louis's face. “So that's how it is, is it. The only way you'd be worried is if I'm in danger too?”

“We've had this conversation before, Louis,” Tawny said patiently, but with a weariness that held her voice down. “You know where I've drawn my line in the sand.”

“But does it have to be the only one?”

Tawny locked her eyes onto Louis's as they looked straight ahead, reflecting on the absurdity of both of them responding to each other's questions with another question. The answers were all so obvious, and yet they weren't the ones they were looking for.

“So is this why you came to pick me up?” she finally asked.

“Well, yeah,” he answered, more tamely this time. “But you don't have to worry, I haven't been driving except to come pick you up today.”

Tawny turned again and stared discreetly down at the ground, not quite knowing what to say. She stared at nothing particular, just contemplating the delicate resting of her feet on the car floor. It was a little game she used to play by herself when she was little, staring long enough until her mind started playing tricks on her, convincing her that the ground beneath her could open up and dissolve at any moment. It was a sensation she had long internalized without any kind of fear or disquiet, as if she could accept the possibility that such a thing could happen, even if it never did, as part of the natural order of things. But now, she found herself struggling to keep out certain thoughts creeping into her head, as much as she tried to take comfort in the knowledge that she and Louis were together, in one place.

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She knew it was cliché, going through the same routine that her psychologist parents had taught her back in the day. For a moment, she could feel everything give way to light. It was always the same ray of light that shined through ever since that day, when she saw Louis smiling up at her on the school lawn, the morning sun shining down brightly on both of them. After all these years, it was still the same sun in the sky, the same green earth, the same boyish smile, the same unyielding love holding her world together, no matter what new disasters unfolded around them. The same ray of light never stopped shining even while wrapped inside one long catastrophe, a storm piling one piece of wreckage after another along their path and racing to reach the future ahead of them. And it was somehow the same storm that was driving them onward and upward onto new heights, into a future that threatened to engulf them and overturn everything at any moment.

Tawny opened her eyes as the car slowed down. They had arrived at their destination. She looked over at Louis as he finished parking, knowing that he had been glancing over at her the whole time. She smiled slightly and gently placed her hand on his wrist as he raised the handbrake.

“My turn to cook tonight?”

Louis looked somewhat nervously down at her hand. “Um... Don't you have that article you have to finish tonight?”

Tawny's smile widened. “So?”

“So I decided to do some cooking before picking you up. I got out of work a bit earlier today, so...” He let his voice trail off and just smiled back at her.

Tawny kept looking into Louis's eyes, the smile on her face giving way to seriousness. “You're amazing, Louis.” She kissed him gently on the lips. “Thank you.”

*

“It's been a long week,” Louis finally said, breaking the silence.

Tawny smiled ever so slightly, as if snapping out of her thoughts and back to where the two of them were, seated next to each other on the park bench. She turned and looked absently toward him, as if to appreciate just the fact that he was there. He returned the look, the fatigued but undimmed sparkle in his eyes mirroring hers.

“So we're going to do it just like last year?” he asked. “If we both aced all our midterms, we're doing a weekend trip during spring break, just you and me?”

Tawny let out a slight chuckle. “Let's hope I can keep up with you again,” she said, placing her arm over his shoulder and leaning her head gently against his. “My genius.”

Louis said nothing. She could feel his concentrated gaze next to her, lending the silence an oddly pleasant intensity. Then the words came out softly from next to her and into her ear.

“Where would I be without you, Tawny?”

Tawny smiled again. “I like to think you'd still be up on that flagpole, if it wasn't for my magnetic attraction bringing you back down to earth.”

“Those were crazy times,” Louis reminisced. “Life was one big riot. Me putting together ridiculous schemes, pulling pranks on everybody. And it just went on and on. They could have made a sitcom based on my life and it would have made people laugh.”

He now turned to face her, making her eyes meet his. “And it just took one day to change everything, you know that? That day when I discovered, just by silly accident, that you love me just as much as I love you, I knew things could never be the same. It was too great a miracle. To think that we almost lost each other forever, without ever finding out...”

His voice trailed off as he let his eyes wander into space. She looked at him patiently, thinking of how many times they had taken this walk down memory lane together, their hands grasping each other tightly, as if just to make sure they wouldn't lose each other along the way.

“That flagpole incident,” he continued. “First day of junior high. That was the first thing we both remembered. And you know what happened after I fell off the flagpole?” They both smiled, knowing the answer. “I explained to Wexler that it was about me announcing myself, the misfit kid brother looking for something to be good at. And guess what? It all worked out in the end. That was how I ended up meeting you. And soon enough, I found my greatest passion, the only one that mattered. It was you. Falling for you is the best thing I've ever done, Tawny. Even when we were just friends, I learned more from you about life than I could ever have from my parents and teachers. Ever since that day, you've always inspired me to be the best I can be. Nothing that I've accomplished would have been possible without you.”

Tawny looked deeply into his eyes, seeing the deep sparkle in them give way to a burning intensity, and took his hands into hers, ever so naturally and inconspicuously.

“None of it would have been possible without _you_ , Louis,” she finally said. “You're the one who made it all happen. I was just a normal kid passing by, and you decided to turn me into the most special person. That moment, when you smiled up at me after falling off the flagpole... I was there only as a spectator, but you pulled me into your universe and turned me into someone who was so valued and whose opinion so cherished, no matter what kind of scheme you cooked up. You made me an inseparable part of you.”

“And you understood me,” he completed for her. “You understood me like nobody else could. You finally had someone to unleash all your wisdom on. And it took a while at first, but... in the end, you worked your magic. You single-handedly changed the course of my life, Tawny. I... I would be nothing without you.”

Tawny bit her lip. It was that burning intensity in his eyes, so full of conviction and incertitude at the same time. It was somehow all too much. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She opened them again and could see the look on Louis's face softening ever so slightly, waiting expectantly for whatever it was that she was going to say.

“Louis,” she began, shifting both her hands onto his wrists. “What you've shown me all these years is just the opposite. You're capable of so much. And you had it in you the whole time, even if you didn't know it. And I just happen to be the person you chose to discover it with together. It's an incredibly empowering feeling, isn't it?”

The look in his eyes remained unchanged, but she knew, behind that look of sincere intensity, that he understood. She smiled, taking in the feeling she knew so well and cherished so much. How he could understand her so easily, better than he could anybody else, all because of what little that she had to do to understand him.

“That's my deepest wish, Louis,” she went on. “That you'll always let that feeling empower you, whenever you're faced with doubt. And that you'll always be able to rely on it for strength. Even if I'm no longer there someday.”

Louis just stared for a few seconds, the intensity in his eyes undiminished. Tawny thought for a moment if she should have just left that last part out. But she was only trying to be truthful with him, as much as she could.

“What are you saying, Tawny?” he finally asked, an uneasy softness in his voice.

She quietly let out a deep breath. “All I'm saying is life is full of contingencies,” she began. “Remember when we were making our video tapes? I remember exactly what I was feeling when I made that tape for you. The idea of losing you, forever, made me look for strength in all the things you meant to me. It gave me the strength to say those three words that I had never said to anyone before, apart from my parents. And everything I said in that video was true, Louis. As long as I live... I was never going to forget what you meant to me, never going to stop drawing strength and inspiration from it.”

She smiled again, looking confidently into his eyes to find the uneasiness dissipating, little by little. “It was like I had to go through that feeling of lack in order to overcome it,” she continued. “Because lack is always going to be a part of life. And we both overcame it that day, together, because we weren't going to let it make us give up on each other.”

Louis kept staring back into her eyes. His lips opened ever so slightly and then closed again, turning ever so slightly into a smile that made the silence that much more delightful.

“And then contingency gave back with mom losing that election and our video messages reaching their destinations,” he finally said. “And there's nothing it can do now to come between us. Nothing.” The look in his eyes now seemed to overflow with assurance. “I believe in it, Tawny, as strongly as I could believe in anything. You're going to do great things someday, and I'm always going to be right there at your side. I promise you.”

Tawny said nothing. Instead, she pulled Louis into a kiss and held him tightly to her lips, before either of them could say anything else. Almost as if the words were too much, overshooting their intended meaning with imaginations of a future that was too far away, a future that their present moment, the air they were breathing and the words they exchanged, could not hope to identify with. She just held him in that embrace, trying to capture this moment for as long as possible, not wanting to let go.

*

Tawny sat in front of her computer, trying to put the finishing touches on her article. She had gone through the entire text again for a third time, having proofread everything, with only the concluding paragraph left to write. The hardest part was always the ending, whether it was an academic paper or an op-ed piece like this one. The hardest part was giving the sense of a conclusion to the staged encounter between the writer and her imagined audience, however fanciful. Being on the writers' collective of one of the few leftist online magazines left meant operating on the margins of the public space, with no room for illusions about how many people were actually being reached. In recent weeks especially, every article felt like the proverbial message in a bottle, a cry of desperation whose message was not least to communicate the mere fact of the sender's existence. Occasionally, an article or two got wider attention, especially when she dialed up the provocation; that's when the death threats and, more rarely, the e-mails of support started coming.

Tawny ran her hand across her forehead and looked down at the bony fingers of her other hand spread across the keyboard. Occasionally, a part of her tried to imagine herself just living a quiet, settled-down life with a family and getting on with her academic career. In a way, she was doing most of that. She had already come a long way in academia, and most importantly, she had Louis. If there was ever going to be a reason to dial down her activist work and go for the quiet, settled-down life, Louis would have to be it. But he didn't want that, and that was good enough for her.

She started typing again. The words began to flow in one of those short, random bursts that always seemed to come just when her thoughts had started wandering aimlessly. She stopped and looked at the paragraph she had just written, speed-reading through it over and over. This was going to have to do, at least for tonight. She scrolled through the text one more time and then pressed “Post.”

Just then, Louis walked discreetly into the study, holding a cup of tea in his hand. Tawny turned and looked toward him as he walked ever so gingerly toward her with the cup in hand, letting her enjoy watching him a bit longer. He then placed the cup on her desk and knelt down next to her chair, putting his hand on top of hers on the armrest.

“How's it going with the article?” he asked.

“I just posted it,” Tawny replied, feeling the weight being lifted from her shoulders with those words. She looked down at the teacup. It was jasmine tea, her favorite. “Thank you, Louis,” she said softly. She took a sip and then looked again into his eyes with a renewed fortitude.

“You're the best, Tawn,” Louis just said. “You're amazing.” The softness in his voice echoed hers and gave his words a touch of intimacy, as if he didn't want them to leave this room even though he would have felt no shame in announcing it to the world. “And to think that I, of all people, ended up with you...” His voice trailed off. He looked down at their hands and then cautiously back up at her eyes.

“Our anniversary's coming up, you know that?”

Tawny let out a tired chuckle. “We never celebrate our anniversaries,” she gently reminded him.

“I know,” Louis just replied, letting his eyes wander. “It's just...” He stopped again as his eyes met squarely again with hers. “The whole situation now, it makes you think about a lot of things. Like the decision to put off having children. Thinking about it now, it really was the best decision we could have made.”

Tawny looked into Louis's eyes a little longer, then down at their interlocking hands. She then gently lifted their hands from the armrest and lowered herself from the chair onto her knees, facing him eye to eye, and took both of his hands in hers.

“Louis,” she began. “We're going to have children eventually. Don't forget we're fighting for them, too. For a future they can grow up in.”

Louis nodded slightly, his eyes flickering again between their hands and her eyes. It wasn't so much uncertainty showing on his face, but something else.

“The truth is,” he said. “It's not really in our hands at this point, is it? Who knows when this madness is going to end. And honestly, it doesn't matter to me so much if we get to have kids or not. Nothing matters to me as much as you do, Tawny. Nothing and nobody.”

Tawny kept her eyes locked onto his, not quite knowing what to say. It was that burning intensity in his eyes, as embattled and determined as ever.

Louis let out a sigh, as if trying to rein in the magnitude of what he was saying. “My parents are retired, Ren and Donnie are all settled down with their families,” he went on. “They're all going to be fine. They've always been fine without me. But the two of us, we've relied on each other for everything since day one. And I wouldn't have wanted it any other way. I can't imagine having kids to be afraid for, on top of everything else going on right now.”

“So that's what it is,” Tawny interjected, as gently as possible. “It's fear.”

Louis nodded again, even though the look in his eyes kept suggesting otherwise. “I wish I wasn't afraid all the time,” he just went on, calmly. “And you make me not want to be afraid. You're the kind of person I would trust with the fate of the entire world in your hands. But you're also everything I'm afraid of losing. The only thing and everything. You're everything to me and more.”

He let out another sigh. “People involved in activism are getting killed, Tawny. On the way to work and right in front of their homes. And then the police doesn't even want to know who did it. The point is, it can get even worse and we don't know what's coming next.”

Tawny looked downward and shifted her hands onto his wrists. “You're right,” she began. “It's the uncertainty of it all. We know what this state is capable of, we just don't know how much further they'll go.” She quietly let out a deep breath. “People like us have been privileged for long enough to not have to deal with actual repression. All those years of activism, and the worst that's happened to me is the occasional pushing and shoving at demonstrations.”

“We haven't exactly lived in the hotspots of unrest, in all fairness,” Louis gently interjected. “You've always done what you could.”

Tawny let her eyes wander again. “The truth is,” she went on. “I don't know what's coming any better than you do. I don't know how much longer I'll be able to do what I'm doing now. I can't say how well I'd put up if they were to lock me up one day and torture me. There's just no way of knowing, though I've thought about it at times.”

She looked into his eyes a little longer. They spoke back to hers with a blank intensity, just waiting expectantly for whatever it was she was going to say next.

“But one thing I do know is there's nothing they can do to take you away from me, Louis. You're an inseparable part of me that nobody can rip out, not even by cutting me up into pieces. No matter what happens to me, I know you're always going to be there.”

Louis closed his eyes as they welled up with tears. Tawny put her arms around him and held him tightly, her cheek placed firmly against his and soaking up any of the tears that flowed out. She drew slowly back and looked into his eyes, trying to draw strength from the burning intensity in them.

“Louis,” she went on, almost in a whisper. “Remember back when we were in junior high? Remember all those times we were so close to losing each other, because of some silly conflict, or me going away to art school, or you moving to DC?” Her lips turned into an affectionate smile. “It sometimes felt like a corny soap opera, and it might sound corny that I'm saying it now. But in the midst of all that, you made me understand, Louis. You made me understand what it is to love and stay true to that love, through all the highs and lows. You made me understand what it is to identify with something greater than myself. I was a peace activist before I became your companion, but there's nothing that made me into what I am now as much as you did. And it's an incredibly liberating feeling, knowing that because of what you mean to me, there's nothing to be afraid of. They can take me away, but they can't take away the most precious part of me.”

Louis closed his eyes shut and drew her into an embrace, as if the words were too much. But she knew, deep down, that he felt the same way. They always felt the same way. She drew back, looking into his eyes with their interlocking hands between them, right back where they started.

“It's true,” Louis said softly, but with conviction. “It's true, as much as it hurts to even think about it. No matter what happens to either of us... We'll always have each other.”

Tawny smiled again, letting the words just sink in. She then gently extricated her hands from Louis's and reached toward her desk, opening one of the drawers to find an old photo album that she had been keeping there in recent weeks, browsing through it occasionally during breaks from work. She shifted over on her knees next to Louis so that he could see it, and then opened the album to reveal an old picture of the two of them together at an anti-war demonstration in 2003, at the height of the Iraq War, shortly after they had gotten together. She slowly flipped through the pages, showing photos from one demonstration after another, from one year to the next. The photos had all the aura of a past era, with the old camera quality and the date imprints at the bottom corner.

“I can't believe we're only 14, 15 in these pictures,” Louis mused. “I can't believe you're only 14 years old and you're at these protests. All I'm doing there is accompanying you.” He fell silent, the thoughts slowly translating themselves into words.

“We wouldn't be in such a mess as a country right now if... if only we were all like you.”

Tawny let out a tired chuckle, still looking down at the pictures. “We would be in a different kind of mess then, wouldn't we.”

Louis turned to look at her, his eyes speaking to her with a dead seriousness. “Maybe it's just silly,” he went on, with the same thoughtful evenness in his voice. “But to me, you stand for a different kind of America that never was. Everything that could have been, the stuff that lives on only in our dreams. And I still try to believe there's a little bit of you in all of us. Even if we don't know it yet.” His lips turned ever so slightly into a smile, in between the intensity of his gaze. “Who knows, maybe we will someday.”

Tawny looked searchingly into his eyes, not knowing what to say. It was the same sparkle in them, the same something that could always spawn such crazy feelings, as if for the first time all over again. He was making her sound more important than she was, of course, but she didn't want to tell him that. It was somehow all too much, and yet it was this very excess that she felt the urge to embrace and envelop, before it would dissipate into the darkness of the night. All she wanted to do was capture this moment for as long as possible, like no camera could. She put her arms around Louis and closed her eyes, holding him in a tight embrace, not wanting to let go.

She kept her eyes shut, thinking of earlier times.

*

Tawny sat on the edge of her bed, dressed in her long white nightgown, looking into the mirror. Louis had come over to her place for one of their Friday sleepovers to mark the end of midterms week. Another evening of watching Twilight Zone episodes and philosophizing about life had come to an end. Louis had gone out for a shower, leaving her alone in her room.

She stared at herself in the mirror, studying the little details of her face, following her own eyes as they wandered. From an early age, she had spent a lot of time staring at the mirror, the piercing gaze of her blue eyes trying to pull apart the image that appeared so whole on the glass surface. Sometimes, she could feel her mind playing tricks on her if she stared long enough, making her see parts of her face moving when they actually weren't. She had come to take an odd liking to it, as if it made palpable for her the invisible gap between herself and that image, that object that was somehow closer than it appeared and yet never quite reachable. And on nights like this one, after spending an entire evening with Louis, that gap seemed to dissolve in the trail of delight that he left behind, only for her to put it back together again, little by little.

She rose from the bed and walked over to the window, pulling the curtain to the side. She looked up at the clear night sky, the deep black interspersed with the faraway light of the stars. The sky always had this magnetic attraction, making her turn toward it and look for the stars even though they could never gaze back at her. There was something about the feeling of being an insignificant little speck in the grand scheme of things, a grand scheme that was always so elusive, fluid and yet to be written, embedded in the infinitude of a sky stretched out in all possible directions like an endless canvas.

She pulled the curtain back over the window and looked down at the ground, staring at nothing particular, just contemplating the delicate resting of her feet on the floor. She then lowered herself to her knees and joined her hands on her lap, one hand clutching the other. She closed her eyes and looked up toward the sky, the darkness in front of her merging into the infinitude of the night. A stream of half-images rushed through her head, whizzing by before they could be pinned down into thoughts. She could feel the blood in her interlocking hands running in unison, with a combined force that overflowed the vessels containing them. The walls of her heart gave way and spilled out its contents, gushing out like milk into the rest of her body. As her leg muscles went numb, the ground beneath it seemed to dissolve, her body floating in a state of suspension, held up only by the interlocking of the two hands. For a moment, she could feel everything give way to light, a light that shone right through the night sky and never went out, especially on nights like this one.

“Tawny?”

A familiar voice sounded, leaving a trail of echoes inside her head. The voice breathed flesh back into her bones and formed her lips into an instinctive smile, restoring with it her bodily senses, one after another. Her arms and legs fell back into place and rushed everything back to where it came from, the tight interlocking of both hands guiding it along its way.

She rose to her feet and turned around, just in time for the door to open, with Louis standing there in the doorway. He was dressed in his pyjamas, his hair still slightly wet from the shower. He had that adorable lost-dog kind of look on his face, as if contemplating where he had just landed.

Tawny suppressed a chuckle, her lips turning instead into an ever so slight smile. “Ready to go to bed?” she asked innocently, but with a depth she herself couldn't fathom.

Louis smiled slightly back and strolled casually into the room, climbing onto the bed. Tawny lied down onto her side and took hold of Louis's hand as he lay next to her, his face turned toward hers.

“Were you busy admiring your beautiful self in the mirror?” he asked, with the most natural straight face he could muster.

She smiled. “Not quite.” She gently extricated her hand from his and ran her fingers through the strands of his curly hair protruding outward, looking intently into his eyes.

“You're the one who taught me that love is narcissistic,” he went on. “Isn't that right?”

She said nothing, still gently playing with his hair. Those eyes always had the same deep sparkle in them, the same little something that could make her feel such crazy things and think such crazy thoughts. Like the knowledge that she could trust this rascal with her life, that it was somehow the one thing she always knew she could trust him with, even back in his days as a class clown. And it was the most liberating feeling in the world.

“In a way, it is.” She put her hand right back where his was, grasping it firmly. “But that doesn't mean it's inaccurate. It doesn't mean you're not actually a beautiful person, Louis. On the contrary.” She gave him a meaningful smile.

Louis was looking intently into her eyes. It was that look of intensity that only she could induce from him, the look that told her so many things at once through the delightful silence.

“That's deep,” he finally said. “I'll think about it on my way to dreamland, okay?”

“Good night, my love.”

“Sweet dreams.”


	2. Chapter 2

“Tawny?”

Tawny opened her eyes to find Louis sitting at her bedside, a look of affectionate concern on his face. She turned instinctively to read the clock on the counter next to the bed. It was 6:58.

“Louis,” she said softly, raising herself to a sitting position. “What's the matter?”

Louis took his tablet from his lap and placed it in front of her to look at. “I think you should see this.”

Tawny took the device in her hands and saw the boldfaced headline that jumped out of the screen and into their bedroom like an unwelcome guest. _President declares nationwide state of emergency, deploys troops across the country to “restore order”_.

“It's in effect as of six o'clock this morning,” he added.

“So he's gone all-out nuclear,” she just said, trying to process what it all meant.

“So... What do you think is going to happen?” he asked, hesitantly.

“Due process has been suspended,” Tawny half-read off the screen, her interpretation filling in the rest. “All bets are off. The police and military can detain anyone on suspicion of threatening national security.”

She scrolled down a bit further. “Ordinary people have nothing to worry about,” she read out the president's quote in a distanced, almost ironic tone. “For agitators, on the other hand, their day of reckoning has come.” She looked back up at Louis, a blank look of stoicism on her face, knowing full well the intended destination of that message. She could see him trying to muster the best stoic look of his own, but clearly struggling to do so. His eyes fidgeted for a few moments and then locked themselves onto hers, his lips flickering slightly as if trying to come up with something to say but not exactly knowing what.

Just then, Tawny's phone vibrated on the counter. She reached to pick it up and stared at the caller ID for a few seconds, slightly surprised, before raising it up to her ear. “Dad?”

“Good morning, sweetie.” Dr. Dean's voice came ever so delicately across the line. “We thought we'd give you a call after hearing the news this morning, your mom and I.”

Tawny waited for him to continue, not quite knowing what to say. Even though her parents were just a few hours' drive away in Sacramento, they somehow seemed to emanate from an entirely different world, tucked safely away in a distant corner of the universe.

“We saw your article last night, Tawny.” He paused for a moment. “Your mom and I want you to know that we're very proud of you. We know you're going to keep on doing what's right. Just make sure to take good care of yourself. And don't forget where you come from.”

Tawny bit her lip, trying to think of what to say. There were so many things she wanted to say to them, but she managed to convince herself every time that now wasn't the time. Not now, when they were worlds apart and connected only by phone.

“Thanks, dad.” Tawny's voice came out with measured affection. “I love you both very much. Louis and I will be fine, so please don't worry.”

The line remained silent for a few seconds. “We love you, Tawny. Goodbye.”  
  


“Goodbye.” She kept the phone by her ear, waiting motionlessly until he hung up.

Louis looked up from the phone he had been staring down at. “My mom just sent me a text,” he said. “She says to take care and sends out hugs and kisses to both of us.” Tawny smiled slightly as Louis now gave her a reassuring look. It was surreal now to think that her mother-in-law, the retired state senator Eileen Stevens, had once been in frontline politics, back in much simpler times. To think that it was that special election to Congress back in 2003, decided by a mere 17 votes after a recount, that had brought Louis and Tawny together for good. Eileen had ruled out running for federal office again after that, after realizing how much being in Sacramento meant to her family. Tawny always tried to think how fortunate it was for Eileen to have stayed out of the quagmire of Capitol Hill politics there and then, though she knew that at the end of the day, she was only looking for ways to justify to herself her own happiness that had been made possible as a side effect of Eileen's heartbreaking loss.

“She didn't sound terribly worried,” Louis went on. “She knows I'm in good hands with you.” He reached out and grasped her hand with his, gently but firmly.

Tawny said nothing, just looking back at him in acknowledgment. “Have you heard anything from Twitty?” she then asked, changing the subject.

Louis shook his head. Tawny's thoughts wandered as she tried to picture their childhood friend in a faraway reality from theirs. Twitty had spent several years as a relief pitcher in the minor leagues after getting drafted out of college, then moved to New York to start a band with a group of college friends. He had already fulfilled two of his childhood dreams, but just didn't get very far with either. It seemed so long ago when she and Louis flew all the way to Pennsylvania to watch Twitty pitch, Louis giving him the cream pie in the face treatment after his first save. It had felt like the old days all over again, the inseparable trio just having fun and, for a moment, not having a care in the world. But reality soon overtook them all, as Twitty didn't make it further up the minors ladder after that and decided to take up a nomadic lifestyle, living from one gig to the next with his new band. But even as their lives and their worries had grown apart, he was an ever-present reminder of different times, the first non-family member who came to mind at a time like this.

“You alright, doc?” Louis made a slight movement with his face, bringing himself into view as she stared into space. He looked at her with a reassuring, if slightly concerned, smile. She smiled slightly back.

“I'll get breakfast ready while you get dressed.” He gave her a quick kiss on the lips and made his way out of the room.

*

Tawny put on her backpack and walked toward the doorway. She took another glance at her phone to find a few more text messages from people she had hardly kept in touch with, mostly classmates from college and grad school. Faraway acquaintances who had woken up to the same news that morning, knowing her and remembering her well enough to think of her.

She put the phone on standby and stared for a moment at her reflection on the black screen. The expression on her face was as blank as the screen itself, showing someone who was now being looked upon from all sides as a marked woman, whether with passive sympathy or active enmity, and yet had somehow come to terms with it a long time ago.

She looked up to find Louis now standing in front of her with his briefcase in hand. “Ready to roll?” he said softly, but with determination. She looked at him for a moment and then took hold of his hands with hers, not willing to let him go just yet.

“Call me anytime if there's anything, okay?” she said, the quiet firmness in her voice mirroring his. “I'll see you tonight at the GA.” He nodded ever so slightly, but without any kind of hesitation. She then turned to open the door, as if not wanting her words to leave this apartment, however unnecessary they were because Louis already knew.

She took her bicycle from the doorway and carried it down the stairs, taking each step gingerly, with Louis following behind her. She reached the main door and opened it without hesitation, even though she felt a tinge of uncertainty inside. As the two of them stepped out onto the street, they were greeted by sunlight, the same sunlight that was there practically every morning. They looked each other momentarily in the eye and then headed off in their separate directions.

Tawny put on her helmet and climbed onto the seat of her bike, riding off cautiously onto the street. She looked around, looking for the slightest sign that something had changed. People were going about their normal business, to the extent that things in this country could ever be normal again. Shops were opening for the day, the American flags fluttering in unison next to each other on the lampposts. A policeman stood by one of the street corners, looking on passively but attentively as she rode by. So far, so ordinary. Such was the state of permanent emergency that was becoming the rule, in plain view for all to see. Of all the distances they might go, actively disrupting the spectacle of ordinary everyday life surely wasn't it. Even the statewide curfew was spun as a measure directed against “hipsters” and “troublemakers,” while truckers and business owners were exempt. If anything truly shocking was going to happen, it was going to be once the lights on stage went out and the curtains lowered. Everything else they needed had long been normalized, little by little, under the light of day.

*

“Next time, we'll be discussing Adorno's _Minima Moralia_ ,” Tawny announced to the class, looking up from her notes.

The students started filing out in silence, their heads mostly lowered. Tawny discreetly scanned the faces as she gathered the stack of papers in front of her. She had been scanning the whole time during the seminar, as if looking for the slightest sign that something had changed. But the faces in the seminar room told the same story, the one playing itself over and over ever since two of her students had been suspended a month ago for organizing an unauthorized demonstration on campus. It was the same timidity and reticence mixed with an eagerness to just put their heads down and study, like good students had always been taught to do. Somehow, raising the issue in seminar and writing an open letter to the administration in protest, as she had done, only seemed to make matters worse.

“Take care,” she said softly as the last of the students, a curly-haired freshman, walked past. Their eyes met momentarily as he looked back toward her from the doorway, as if thinking about saying something, but he was already gone.

“Professor Dean?” A bald man in a suit appeared at the doorway, just as Tawny had gotten up to put her things in her backpack. She looked up and let out an inner sigh, sensing what this was going to be about.

“The Dean of the College would like to have a word with you,” the man said in the blandest possible tone.

*

“Please take a seat,” Dean Stockton said, gesturing casually toward the chair in front of his desk.

Tawny sat down, trying to think how many times she had been here. It was always the same familiar confines, the same impeccably well-organized desk with the bookshelves surrounding it, as if nothing had changed. It was the same Dean of the College, the only one she had known since coming to this university, who had been one of the first to shake her hand after her tenure review not too long ago. And now, he was going about his job with the same conviction, as the situation evidently required it.

“I assume you know why you're here,” he began, with an air of forced patience. “As you well know, it's been several months now since I've been monitoring your public affairs commentary. So you can rest assured that I read your latest article this morning.”

“I'm grateful for every reader we can get, Dean Stockton,” Tawny replied, with a matter-of-factness that betrayed a certain ironic distance.

The official looked sternly at her. “I wish you would take this seriously,” he said in his schoolmaster-like tone. “Do you realize every article like that from one of our faculty puts all of us, and the entire university, at risk?”

He kept his eyes locked onto hers for a bit longer and then shifted them, as if trying to switch gears. “Look, you know I'm not a fan of this administration myself,” he went on. “We're all in the same boat right now. Things haven't been the same ever since the statewide emergency put the state university system under executive control. And things just got a lot more serious as of this morning. If they can find the right excuse to step in and replace us, the current university administration, with their own stooges, they're going to do it in a heartbeat. Just think about that.”

Tawny let out an inner sigh, knowing there was nothing she could say. It was always the same line, the same logically coherent argument, but based on the same faulty premises that would come out once the monologue went on long enough, without her even having to say a thing.

“If you're not going to do it for anyone else, at least do it for your colleagues,” the dean went on. “I'm asking you to hold back with your op-eds for just a few months, until things turn for the better, until they eventually run out of excuses for maintaining this whole state of emergency in the first place. That's all I'm asking. And this is the last time I'm going to ask you, Professor Dean. Don't make me have to choose between you and the good of the entire university.”

Just then, Tawny's phone vibrated inside her pocket, the distinct pattern of the vibration alerting her to the identity of the caller. “Excuse me, I have to take this call,” she said, walking hurriedly out of the office.

“Louis?” she spoke firmly but discreetly into the phone as she reached the hallway. She heard nothing on the other end except for faint shuffling noises. “Louis,” she said again, more forcefully this time.

Her heart seemed to skip a beat as the shuffling noise finally gave way to a voice. “Tawny?” Louis replied across the line. His voice came out somewhat quizzically, but loud and clear.

“Sorry, did I just call you? I didn't mean to, I think the speed dial got pressed by accident.”

Tawny remained silent for a few seconds. “It's okay, Louis,” she finally said. “My phone's always on for you, okay?”

“Thanks, Tawny,” Louis said. “The same goes for you too, of course.”

“Bye,” Tawny replied and hung up. She turned around to find the dean closing his office door across the hallway, shaking his head, with an impatient frown on his face. She took a deep breath and started walking back.

*

“Good evening,” Tawny announced to the people seated around the table who had come to attend the hastily convened general assembly of the alliance of community organizations, informally known as The Coalition. “As you all know, a nationwide state of emergency is in effect as of this morning. This leaves us with a number of decisions to make. The main item on the agenda we agreed on for tonight is the question of how to proceed with our weekly demonstrations in front of city hall.”

She paused and scanned the faces, as if waiting for any interjections, but nothing came. Louis was seated near one of the edges of the table, discreetly avoiding eye contact.

“I will be the point person for tonight's meeting,” she went on. “Please give me a hand signal if you would like to speak and I'll add you to the list.”

She looked around the table and gave each person with a hand up a slight nod in acknowledgment, jotting down the names.

“The way I see it, carrying on with the weekly protests right now would be madness,” Steve, a bald man with a neatly trimmed white beard, began. “All bets are off. The police can do whatever they want with us. We could all lie down on the ground and put our hands up and it wouldn't matter. They could arrest us and beat us up just for being there under the new rules. End of story.”

“What, so we're just going to sit on our hands and do nothing?” Mark, another older man with a bony face and tattoos on his neck, spoke up. “We're just going to stay home every night and play bridge, like the governor ordered? There isn't anybody else left, Steve. It's either us or total surrender. This whole country is sleepwalking into oblivion. Are the history books in 50 years going to have anything to say about people who resisted or not? That's all I'm going to say.”

“If you want to get in the history books for starting a massacre, then count me out,” Steve retorted.

“Steve, please,” Tawny gently interjected. “It's Chantelle's turn.”

Chantelle, a gray-haired woman wearing horn-rimmed glasses and hoop earrings, nodded slightly in acknowledgment. “We have to think about the safety of our young people,” she began in a slow, even tone. “We're sitting here talking about how future generations are going to judge us, but we can't forget that at least half the people who come to our protests are high school and college kids. They have their entire future ahead of them. And that's one thing we can't sacrifice, Mark. Things are looking bleak right now, but there are going to be future battles to fight, and young people are our only hope. We can't ask them to put everything on the line now, when things are most bleak. The time will come, but it's not now.”

“Can I just make a short reply directly to that, please?” Mark asked with two fingers raised, turning toward Tawny. She looked up from her notes and gave him a slight nod.

“Let me tell you one thing,” he began. “I spent the late 60s taking part in civil rights marches as a teenager. I can tell you those protests would have never gotten anywhere without the thousands of us young men and women there, facing the police dogs and water cannons. This whole present vs. future thing is a false dichotomy. If we don't fight for the present, there's no future.”

“Let the young people speak for themselves, Mark,” Steve interjected. “All the great things our generation has done are clearly no good now. We've gotten into this mess under our watch, at the end of the day.”

“Steve, there are people on the list waiting to speak,” Tawny reminded him.

“Tawny, you're a lot younger, aren't you,” Steve replied. “Tell us what you think.”

Tawny looked at him for a moment, the other faces around the table now turning toward her. She then looked down at the list of names. “Chris is the next person on the list,” she finally said. “He's the youngest person here. Let's all listen to what he has to say.”

Chris, a lanky teenager with disheveled hair, looked around at the faces now turned in his direction.

“I obviously can't speak for all the 'young people' out there,” he began, somewhat hesitantly. “I can speak for myself and Jared, Derek, and Marley, who couldn't come tonight because of evening detention. Things are really difficult right now because we never thought of school as a place where they discipline you for political reasons, but things have changed ever since the statewide emergency, and they've gotten worse the last few weeks. We would like to keep coming out to the protests, we really would. But it's hard when the entire system is working against you, when they're threatening to not let you graduate and colleges are threatening to withdraw acceptances. And that's what we're up against, not just the police. If all we had to do was put our bodies on the line, we would do it. But things just aren't as simple as we might like them to be.”

An uneasy silence fell over the room, with nobody quite willing to step back in. Tawny looked down at the next name on the list, then scanned the faces again, but couldn't bring herself to break the silence.

“I think one thing's clear,” Chantelle finally said. “We have to stick together. Either all of us commit to the weekly protests or we call them off.”

Tawny remained silent, just scanning the faces again. Steve was looking toward Mark, who was looking blankly down at the table in front of him, biting his lip. Most of the others were hunched over, not looking at anything in particular. Louis was looking expectantly toward Tawny, as if waiting for something to come out, but nothing came.

*

“Why didn't you say anything at the meeting?” Louis finally asked.

Tawny looked blankly out the windshield. “What was I supposed to say?” she asked back. “We reached a consensus decision in the end. My job there isn't to talk, it's to listen.”

Louis nodded slightly. He didn't say anything else, as if just trying to focus on the road ahead. She looked toward him as he drove, the same look of intensity in his eyes. She knew something was on his mind, but she didn't mind waiting for him to bring it up on his own. She looked down at her watch. They had reached their destination, just in time for curfew, with all the time in the world to talk inside their four walls.

They got out of the car and walked in silence toward the apartment building. There was an eerie silence all around them, as if it was well past midnight instead of just a quarter to ten. Louis opened their mailbox on their way in and gave her a look of slight relief as he found nothing there. She smiled slightly back, clutching his hand more tightly as they walked up the stairway toward their apartment.

“Tawny, there's something I have to tell you,” Louis announced, almost as soon as the door clicked behind them. He put down his briefcase and waited a moment for her to finish taking off her backpack, the two of them still standing with their shoes on halfway between the living room and the doorway.

“All the things we said last night,” he began. “It's all true. You know it and I know it. They can't do anything to come between us. But even if they try, I'm not going to let it happen, okay? If they come for you...” He stopped and bit his lip, looking searchingly into her eyes. “If they come for you, I'm going with you. Whatever they do with you, they're going to have to do with me, too.”

He walked up to her and took her hands in his. “I'm asking you to just trust me. The only place I want to be is where you are, wherever that is. That's how it's always been and always will be. No matter what happens now, I'm staying with you until the very end.”

An ever so thin stream of tears escaped his eye and flowed halfway down his cheeks. The look in his eyes and the intonation in his voice remained as steady as ever, but there was a burning impatience in them that belied the calm evenness in his words. Something wasn't right. It was the sense of foreboding, almost as if he was daring somebody to show up at that door any minute now that he had said what he had to say.

Tawny closed her eyes and fell to her knees, holding his hands with her palms raised upwards. She took a deep breath and bit her lip. It was somehow all too much, and yet it was the same familiar gestures, the same determination, the same way they always felt for each other. They had been here so many times before, and yet she found herself fighting the same battles, the same demons trying to creep into her head.

Suddenly, a loud knock sounded. Tawny opened her eyes and looked ever so calmly at Louis, now facing her on his knees, a flash of disquiet running through his eyes. She gently wiped the half-dry stream of tears from his cheek and then rose to her feet, heading toward the door.

*

Tawny opened the door to find three uniformed police officers standing there, almost casually, as if announcing themselves as expected guests.

“Tawny Dean?” The officer in the front half-asked in an indifferent tone.

“That'll be me,” Tawny replied without hesitation.

“You'll have to come with us,” the officer said.

Tawny calmly took a few steps out the doorway and just stood in front of the officer, waiting for him to do whatever he needed with her.

“I'm going with her,” Louis's voice came out forcefully from behind. The officers seemed to ignore him, as one of them took hold of Tawny's arm and began leading her away.

“For goodness sake, just take me with you,” Louis insisted, storming out of the house and trying to put himself in the way of the officer holding Tawny's arm. As if on cue, the other two policemen grabbed him roughly by the arms and pinned him onto the adjacent wall, taking out a pair of handcuffs.

“Louis,” Tawny turned and began to snap, but her voice held back so that it only came out as a loud whisper. She took a deep breath. “You put the cuffs on him, you put them on me. Or on neither of us.” She demonstratively put her hands and arms behind her back into a handcuffed position and then turned to face Louis, the blank expression in her eyes trying to tell him a thousand things at once as one of the officers turned him around and another began applying the handcuffs onto her wrists. She could see in his eyes the same burning intensity, that all so familiar, indelible look that gave her the strangest kind of reassurance even as it looked like it could tip over into blind despair at any moment.

The policemen led them away and down the stairs in a double file, with Tawny at the front and one of the officers holding her by the arm next to her. The officer opened the main door and led them out toward the two police cars parked in front of the apartment building. Tawny glanced behind her to find another officer leading Louis to the other car while her own escort directed her toward a police van with two other officers standing in front of it. Her eyes momentarily met Louis's before the men in uniform nudged them rather impatiently into their separate vehicles.

Tawny climbed onto the middle compartment of the van, her hands fastened behind her back, joined by two officers who took their seats next to and across from her. So she gets the van and the VIP treatment, she thought to herself. Very Important Prisoner, with whatever implications that had. One of the policemen was seated directly facing her, with a pair of dark aviators covering his eyes from view. She looked blankly at him in return. So this ride was going to be one long staring contest. There wasn't really anywhere else to look, with the side window areas paneled over.

She let her thoughts wander as she kept staring into the dark abyss of those shades, trying to picture the deserted streets outside. How far away everything suddenly seemed, the outside world, the rest of the country, Mark, Chantelle, the people she had been with just an hour ago, everything separated by the abyss materialized right in front of her. And the deeper the abyss gazed back at her, the more she was somehow drawn into it, not even thinking of looking away.

She collected her thoughts, little by little, trying to think of what awaited her, even though she knew there was no point in doing so. There was no need to overthink this. She had to be ready for the worst, while keeping things as simple as possible. If they were going to break her physically, they were going to break her physically. Everything else followed from accepting that simple fact. And if that was what it was going to take, she was ready to do it. The only question was getting there as seamlessly as possible before any other harm could be done.

The van started slowing down. There were certain things she was ready to do for Louis, certain things she had always been ready to do, even if she didn't know it. And yet, there was nothing romantic, nothing heroic about it. There weren't going to be any good choices she would be allowed to make, if it really came that far. Whatever choice she made under duress would be a selfish one in the end, even if she would convince herself that it was what had to be done.

The van finally screeched to a halt as they reached their destination.

*

Tawny was led into a dimly lit office, the same policeman keeping hold of her arm the whole time. A plainclothes officer rose to his feet behind his desk, a middle-aged, clean-shaven man with short dark hair and thin eyebrows. He was dressed in a dress shirt with suspenders, the sleeves rolled up.

“Professor Dean,” the officer called out expectantly as the accompanying guard proceeded to remove her handcuffs. “You have no idea how much I've looked forward to this great honor.”

“Spare me, officer,” Tawny said icily, extricating her hands from behind her back. “I believe you've summoned me with a rather different purpose in mind tonight.”

The officer stared at her for a moment, with a slightly admonishing look of what almost looked like hurt on his face. “You shouldn't jump to conclusions like that,” he said, his voice ever so soft-spoken yet laced with an enigmatic touch. “I'm Officer Modesto,” he then announced in a straightforward tone and gestured to the chair in front of his desk before taking his own seat.

Tawny sat down with her back upright, her hands discreetly holding each other on her lap. The guard went out, leaving the two of them alone in the office.

Modesto clasped his hands together on his desk and looked across at Tawny. “So you think you know why you're here?”

“I'm waiting to be enlightened,” Tawny replied, more coolly than coldly this time.

The officer smirked at her slightly, then put on a pair of browline glasses and picked up a file from his desk. He leaned back on his chair and looked at it casually. “I see you're quite the accomplished scholar, especially for your age,” he began. “Just look at all the stuff on your résumé. Two books already and too many articles to count. Expertise in critical and postcolonial theory, deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis...”

He let his voice trail off, then lowered the file and met her eyes squarely with his. “So tell me, professor, how can Lacanian psychoanalysis explain the mess this country is in today?”

Tawny said nothing, keeping her eyes locked on her counterpart's. She sensed where this was going and knew that it was a game she couldn't win. It was a rigged game where every move she made would be trumped by a counter-move on this giant chessboard they were sitting on, as if she was facing not a person but a machine programmed to outplay every opponent.

The officer let out a slight chuckle and slowly removed his spectacles with one hand. “I've been working on your case for some time now, Professor Dean,” he began, in an an oddly professorial tone. “And I must say you're truly an extraordinary person. Believe it or not, I know a thing or two about the kind of stuff you write about. I know you and your kind extremely well, actually.” He ran the tip of his glasses suggestively across his cheek and onto the edge of his lips.

“You see,” he went on. “I'm old enough to know better than your generation of yippie millennials, but I'm also young enough to know exactly where you're coming from. I majored in English in college and graduated in 2002, just about ten years before you did. I was into a lot of postmodern philosophy as a student myself back in the day. I even started a PhD but dropped out after two years. That's about half the time it took for you to finish yours, I believe.”

The look on his face kept signaling to her, with every sentence, that he knew more than what he was telling her. Tawny kept silent, the blank look on her face unchanged. The trick is to keep this rigged game going for long enough, she thought to herself. The question was how to maneuver herself into checkmate as seamlessly as possible, before any other harm could be done.

“I've gotten to know a lot of these critical theory types over the years,” Modesto went on. “Most of them go on to law or finance and live their nice little accommodated lives. The second group remain in academia and content themselves with writing obscure books in their ivory tower. They're the type that take to the streets occasionally when the weather's nice. And the third group? The third group is you.”

He kept playing with his glasses, looking at her attentively as if observing a rare breed of human with an odd mixture of secure distance and genuine sympathy.

“You're just not like the rest of them. I would say you're the last man standing, but you're something else. You're the last woman, but not just that. You're the last and the first. You've been a left-wing activist since the age of 12 at least, haven't you. You were out protesting when everybody else your age was busy playing Pokemon. And now you're still out there protesting, when everybody else is busy playing bridge.”

Modesto suddenly broke into a chuckle, with the air of someone finding his own cleverness to be irresistible. He looked at her intently, his face now turning serious as suddenly as it had gone from a straight one.

“And to think this is the generation that was supposed to bring socialism to America,” he mused. “I remember when we had your generation on our side, right after 9/11. I can imagine you at that age with your little peace marches, the only kid in the class with anything bad to say about the War on Terror.”

A patronizing smirk came to his face. “It's too bad, really,” he went on. “Fast forward all these years, and look where we are again. The left would have needed several thousand Tawny Deans to even stand a chance. And even then.” He paused for a moment, suggestively. “Just look at you, and look at me. I'm a gay Latino from an inner-city working-class background. You, on the other hand, are a product of white middle-class suburbia.”

“I guess that makes both of us traitors to our class,” Tawny responded, the words coming out ever so naturally.

The officer let out a slight chuckle, then just stared at her for a moment. “Very clever,” he said in a low tone. “But the point is, the left in this country has utterly failed to offer anything to people like myself, hasn't it? Think of all the things you people have been demanding all these years. It's this administration that's bringing back our troops from the Middle East, providing students with debt relief and doing something about the environment. Think about your childhood dreams, professor. They've never been so close to being reality, ever.”

Tawny said nothing. The officer looked at her questioningly, as if daring her to come up with something to say in response.

“Our biggest weapon is that none of you people saw it coming,” he went on. “We're not what you always thought we are, you see. We were never the fascists or the plutocrats you made us out to be. We couldn't care less about ideology. All we care about is One Nation, Under God. We give a little bit to everyone, just as it should be. We don't need total control over society. There are a lot more efficient ways of doing it than that. Humanity has come a long way since the days of _Nineteen Eighty-Four_ , wouldn't you say?”

The cynical smirk returned to his face. He kept playing the good cop, bad cop routine by himself, as if enacting a thinly veiled self-parody and feeling totally at ease with it.

“Think of all the things this country has given you,” he continued. “You've already made it in academia. You have a long life ahead of you, and you can choose to live it in peace and security, doing the things you love, without all the dangers of being an unpatriotic dissident. It's not too late for you to have kids and start a family, remember. You know we're all about family values. You don't possibly think we would let any harm be done to a mother raising little children, do you?”

The officer smiled suggestively. Tawny just looked on and listened. She was being offered the classic pact with the devil. Even if she wanted to accept it, the sheer unpredictability involved was no less than what the alternative had in store.

“Think about it, professor. You're an extremely smart person. It's an easy choice, really. You step away from all your activist work and we let you live your life in peace. In a country where so many of your dreams have already come true. Or you live a life of permanent uncertainty, not knowing what could happen to you the next day.”

Modesto stopped and looked at her expectantly. “What do you say to that?”

Tawny kept looking back at him with the same blank expression on her face. The answer was so obvious, and yet there were so many ways, so many words that could be put into saying it.

“I'm not going to give up my activist work, officer.” Her words came out unassumingly but firmly, with an ominous sense of finality in them.

Modesto stared at her for a moment and then wagged his head slightly. “That's it?” he asked. “That's all you have to say for yourself? We dragged you all the way here a day after your latest anti-American ramblings just for that?”

Tawny remained silent. He was none too subtly trying to provoke her, but she wasn't having any of it.

“You know,” the officer continued, with an extra touch of gravity in his voice. “We can keep bringing you here every now and then and just go through the same routine over and over. And see how you like that.”

He refocused his eyes on her. “Or maybe you could use a little more time in solitude,” he suggested. “I'll give you until 7 o'clock tomorrow morning to think it over one more time. By then I expect a final answer, with all the consequences that come with it. And until then, you stay right here with us.”

Tawny just kept looking blankly at him, as if signaling with her silence the minimal bit of passive consent he needed from her. Modesto nodded slightly. So this is how you want to play it, he seemed to be telling her. He pressed a button under his desk and it took just two seconds for the guard to come in through the door. Tawny rose calmly from her chair as the guard approached and took hold of her arm, signaling the same familiar routine.

“I hope you realize we can keep you locked up for as long as we like. Both you and your husband,” Modesto was quick to add as she was led out.

“Good night, officer,” Tawny replied, with an almost taunting serenity. She glanced over as she walked out to catch a glimpse of Modesto giving her an icy glare that followed her out the door.

*

Tawny was led into a small prison cell, no more than ten feet long or wide. It was equipped with a bunk bed and a sink, the barest essentials. The cell was fitted with metal bars on one side and walled over on the other three.

As the guard locked the door behind her, the lights went out, the ensuing darkness mitigated only by the faint light creeping in from outside the hallway.

Tawny walked gingerly through the dark, finding her way toward the wall on the far end of the cell. She slowly raised her hand and placed it on the cold, hard wall. Somewhere, somehow, the walls of this building led to where Louis was. And beyond the walls the outside world, the rest of the country, the people she knew and loved, the infinitude of the night sky. She just stood there, her face turned upward and toward the past, her body caught between the darkness of the present and the redemptive promise of simpler times.

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. The same familiar feels returned to her, little by little, the darkness in front of her merging into the infinitude of the night and eventually giving way to light. A stream of half-images rushed through her mind, one after another. She was still here, inside the walls of this prison, not thinking of being anywhere else, letting herself just drift and wander about as she had always done.

She kept her eyes shut, thinking of earlier times.


	3. Chapter 3

“Tawny, over here!”

Tawny smiled as she walked over to where Louis was standing on the edge of the woods, her arms crossed. Louis had been more excited for the senior camping trip than she could remember. And so far, she couldn't say it wasn't living up to expectations. The two of them had snuck out after breakfast to spend the morning together just wandering around and exploring, skipping the scheduled group activities.

Louis was just standing there motionlessly, gazing outward with his back turned toward her. As she joined him, he turned to reveal the view he had been contemplating. “Beautiful, isn't it?”

Tawny took a moment to find her bearings as she took in the sight. They were standing above a small chasm with a creek flowing underneath, adorned with green shrubbery that merged into the trees above. Everything merged into everything else in perfect harmony, the tall woodland giving way to the clear blue sky above, the fresh, forest-scented air mingling with the chirping of the birds and the mild sunlight breaking in through the trees.

Louis took a seat on a protruding piece of rock to his left that presented itself with just enough space for both of them to sit. Tawny joined him, resting her hands on the rock on both sides. They just sat there in silence, taking in their surroundings and thinking about nothing particular.

Tawny let her eyes wander, drifting from one area of the wooded theater to another. A pair of sparrows were standing on a tree branch toward the far side of the woods, just within view. One of the feathered creatures was holding something in its beak and trying to bring it to its companion, walking along with its characteristically bouncing motion. The two birds then joined their beaks and used them to hold onto each other, as if trying to kiss and feed at the same time.

Tawny let out a slight chuckle, without even realizing at first. Louis didn't react, his eyes drifting across another section of the forest. Tawny looked up toward the trees and the sky, closing her eyes for a moment and then opening them again to the same sight.

“What a wonderful world,” she said absently, letting her thoughts wander. “Are we ready to fight for it?”

Louis turned slowly to face her, as if waking back from his own musings. He was looking searchingly into her eyes, locking them onto his own with a magnetic attraction, the thoughts slowly translating themselves into words behind them.

“You always have so many things to fight for, don't you?”

Tawny smiled ever so slightly. “In a way, it's only one thing, isn't it?” Her eyes wandered back toward her surroundings. “There's only this one world we have, with all the things we hold dear. And you're right at the center of my universe. But you already know that.” She met his eyes again with hers.

Louis was contemplating her look in silence, as if quietly probing the depths of her heart. It was that subtle mix of casual playfulness and dead seriousness that he mastered like none other, with a naturalness about it that fit seamlessly into the idyllic backdrop.

“So you would fight for me, too?”

Tawny said nothing and kept looking into his eyes. He was just probing, just trying to see what she would say in response. And she wasn't about to answer any less truthfully than she always tried to.

“I would die for you, Louis.”

Louis just stared back. It was that look of intensity in his eyes, burning with a determination that only she could induce from him. It was that look trying to tell her so many things at once, even as they were as simple as they could be, requiring almost no words.

“How can you say that, Tawny?”

“Because it's true.”

He kept staring at her, the look in his eyes now conveying a certitude that couldn't be contained in words. “And I would rather die than let that happen,” he finally said, with calm determination. “It would have to happen over my dead body.”

Tawny looked into Louis's eyes, not knowing what to say. The deep sparkle in his eyes kept drawing her in, but a part of her suddenly felt an intense self-doubt, asking herself what she was doing here, saying such things, entertaining such thoughts. She was getting ahead of herself, for no reason. She was saying these things without having any idea of the kind of things she was pulling both of them into.

Just then, a slight boom could be heard from the sky. The clear blue had turned cloudy and gray, without them even noticing. Tawny looked back up toward the sky, as if suddenly recovering her bearings.

“We should get going,” she just said. She got up from the rock and turned to go, avoiding eye contact with Louis. Her head was buzzing with too many things, too many thoughts. She stood there for a moment with her back turned toward the chasm, trying to reconstruct the path back to the campsite. They must have walked about a mile or so. It would take about fifteen minutes to get back, assuming they didn't get lost, of course. Fifteen minutes to escape the oncoming rainstorm.

“Ow!” Louis suddenly shrieked from behind her. Tawny turned around to find him crouched down, holding his right ankle. It was hardly a split second that she had her back turned, and now this. She quickly knelt down and placed her hands gingerly over his as they grasped at the injured spot.

“What happened?” She managed to whisper while holding her breath.

“I think I twisted it,” he answered. “Damned rock,” he muttered under his breath. He looked up into her eyes, giving her a remorseful look. “I'm sorry.”

“Don't say that,” she said gently. “Are you going to be able to stand up?” She offered one of her hands as the other remained by his ankle. He took it and stood up slowly on his left leg. She rose to her feet with him, now holding onto his left arm with both hands.

“Ow!” He jerked his right foot off the ground, having tried momentarily to stand on it. Just then, the rain started pouring over them, accompanied by smaller bouts of thunder. Tawny looked up at the sky and then down at his two feet again. It was almost like a cruel joke being played on them, with their work cut out and no time to lose.

“Here.” Tawny slung Louis's left arm behind her neck and onto her left shoulder, keeping hold of it with her left hand while using her other one to hold onto his right side. She slowly started walking, supporting him across her shoulders and helping him hop along with one leg as best he could, one step at a time. The rain kept pouring over them, the thunder getting louder. They had an entire mile to walk, with the trees above them making it all the more dangerous in the event of a lightning strike.

Tawny walked a few more steps and then stopped. “This isn't working.” She glanced over at Louis, who looked uncertainly back at her. She then took hold of his outstretched arm and slung it back off her shoulder, holding onto it with both hands to maintain his balance.

“Get on my back,” she said, lowering herself to her knees.

“Are you crazy?” He looked at her in disbelief.

“Just do as I say, Louis. Please.” She looked up toward him, her eyes squinting before the rain and doing their best to conceal her own surprise at the words that just came out.

He said nothing, clearly at a loss. He delicately placed his hands on the back of her shoulders and transferred his weight onto hers, latching gently onto her back. She took his hands across the front of her shoulders and placed his legs over her forearms. She closed her eyes for a moment and opened them again to the same sight of the rainy woodland ahead of them. Louis was right, of course. This was crazy, but so was every alternative in this situation.

“Hold on tight,” she said and raised herself slowly off the ground. She started walking, trying not to think about anything else. Just walk and don't think, she thought to herself. Just walk as if it was the only thing she knew how to do, as if there was nothing to it. She could feel the weight bearing down on her arms and shoulders, even though Louis remained absolutely still, apart from his breathing and the beating of his heart that seemed to flow like small bursts of energy into her back. He was somehow trying to make himself as light as possible and managing to do more than just that.

She quickened her pace, trying not to think about how much there was left to walk. Her arms finally went numb, erasing all sensation and replacing it with a blissful emptiness that drowned out even the sound of the thunder and the rain. It was like in a dream where she felt nothing, not even pain. A part of her could feel the temptation to just close her eyes and let the awareness of the dream just take over, guiding her back to where she needed to go. But she couldn't bear to close her eyes, struggling instead to keep them open. A desperate survival instinct kicked in as she held on for dear life with every step, as if there was nothing else she could let herself think about even if was the only thing she knew how.

She felt her legs starting to give way as the rain-splattered view in front of her turned from forest to tents. They had arrived at the deserted campsite, everyone else gone in search of shelter elsewhere. The sight of the tents seemed to make her legs give way, even though she knew they had to keep on going. She stumbled, unable to go on any further, and finally dropped to her knees on the damp grass, putting up her forearms just in time to land on them. Louis gingerly removed himself off her back, shifting onto his backside with his injured foot outstretched on the grass.

“Are you okay?” he asked anxiously, laying a hand on her arm.

“Let's go,” she replied, in between a series of coughs. “It's not safe here. The thunderstorm... Let's go find the others.”

Louis was just staring at her, an admiring but slightly disbelieving look on his face. “It stopped raining a few minutes ago,” he finally said, trying to reassure her. “We're okay now.”

Tawny looked around her, and then up at the sky. The sun was starting to shine through, with a rainbow in the distance and no more trace of rain to be seen. They had made it. She rolled over onto her back, letting out a deep breath, and closed her eyes.


	4. Chapter 4

“Professor Dean?”

Tawny opened her eyes from the dazed half-sleep she had fallen into. She was still standing in front of the wall, her hand placed on it, her head turned slightly upward, her back turned toward the door. The watch on her wrist was placed right in front of her to read. 6:59. But it was the familiar voice calling that already told her everything she needed to know.

She turned around, just in time for the guard to unlock the door of her prison cell, with Officer Modesto standing behind him. Without being prompted, she walked toward them and out of the cell.

“Did you have a... good night?” Modesto asked with exaggerated emphasis as he beckoned her toward the hallway.

“Why yes, thank you,” she replied calmly and started walking, followed by the officer and the guard.

*

“Please take a seat,” Modesto gestured toward the chair in front of his desk as he took his own seat. Tawny sat down with her back upright, her hands discreetly holding each other on her lap. The guard went out, leaving the two of them alone in the office.

“Coffee?” Modesto offered, taking the coffeepot from his desk with one hand.

“No, thank you,” Tawny answered matter-of-factly.

Modesto was already pouring himself a cup. He took his time filling it up with the just right amount he wanted and then took a sip.

“Now,” he said, settling into his chair again. “What do you have to say?”

Tawny looked at him for a moment, the same blank expression on her face. “My answer is the same as it was last night, officer,” she just said.

Modesto nodded slightly. He looked at her for a little longer, as if giving her a token chance to say more, even though he knew by now what to expect.

“You know, you're just like how I always imagined,” he said, with a tinge of irony. “You're one of a kind. It's just too bad you keep digging a bigger and bigger hole for yourself. You keep proving every time that you'll stop at nothing, even as the stakes get higher. And if you're not willing to stop on your own, my job is to stop your brain from functioning for the next 20 years. It's that simple.”

He took another routine sip of coffee, as if there was nothing out of the ordinary in what he was telling her. “One of the things I said last night is that you're both the last and the first,” he went on. You're the last of your kind, but you're also the first case we've deemed important enough to put to the test, so to speak. The first and the only one, because there's nobody else like you. There's never going to be another Tawny Dean.”

The cynical smirk returned to his face. “You should be honored, really,” he continued. “We could have just waited for you to end up dead in a ditch, like some of the others. But who needs to kill their opponents if you can control them. And that's what we're after, consent. We want people to keep on living, by all means, but on our terms. And you're going to serve as our living example for that.”

Tawny said nothing. Modesto looked at her in silence, as if to let everything sink in. Don't tell me I didn't warn you, he seemed to be telling her. He then rose from his chair, conspicuously refraining from pressing the button under his desk this time.

“After you,” he said suggestively, beckoning toward the doorway. Tawny rose from her seat and headed out, followed right behind by Modesto.

*

Tawny kept walking, with Modesto directing her from behind every now and then to turn left or right. They finally arrived at a long corridor, with two metal doors at the far end of it. The faint inscriptions on them only came gradually into view as they approached. “100” and “101,” they read.

“You can stop,” Modesto called from behind as they stood five feet away from the two doors. He circled around to her side, looking into her eyes.

“Does this ring any bells, Professor Dean?” he asked in an ominous tone. “Two identical, innocent-looking doors, the only clue being the inscriptions on them. A difference of just one digit separating them. If I let you choose which door to open, which one would you choose?”

Tawny remained silent and motionless, just waiting calmly for him to get on with his little act.

“Humanity is so predictable,” the officer sighed, patronizingly. “You know as well as I do. Everyone knows it. All of mankind's nightmares have long been immortalized in the great works of literature. And yet we're all shocked when they come back to us, like a return of the repressed.” He made his way toward the door on the right, facing her the whole time.

“Don't you understand, professor?” he said, placing his hand on the handle. “What's inside Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.” He then thrust the door open with an abruptly vigorous jerk.

“After you,” he said casually, beckoning inside. Tawny walked in without hesitation.

*

Tawny walked into a spacious, brightly lit room with no windows and a long mirror stretching across one of the four walls. A solitary metal chair stood in the middle of the room, facing the mirror and away from a table right behind it with various cords and gadgets lying on top. She walked up to the chair and then stopped.

“Please take a seat,” Modesto directed from behind her.

Tawny sat down with her back upright and placed her arms on the armrests, facing her own image in the mirror. It was the first time she was seeing herself since last night, when she caught a glimpse in the side mirror of their car as they were arriving home. It struck her that her eyes were partly bloodshot and had slightly darkened swellings under them, but the look emanating from them was the same. She remained still, trying to loosen the muscles in her body as much as possible.

Modesto brought a series of thick straps from the table and proceeded to fasten her arms, wrists and heels onto the chair. He went through the motions methodically and dispassionately, observing the look on her face the whole time. Tawny just looked straight ahead, feeling oddly at ease in spite of the restraints being applied to her.

Modesto then produced a series of electric wires and proceeded to connect them to both of her hands. It didn't take much imagination to guess what they were for. As he finished, Tawny glanced down at her hands to find two nodes resembling circular band-aids attached right below the knuckles.

“Welcome to Room 101,” the officer announced, now standing in front of her. “What you're about to see on the screen in front of you is your worst nightmare, played out right in front of your eyes.”

He looked attentively at her, as if looking for the slightest hint in her facial expressions. But they still remained as blank as the void she was staring into, calmly waiting for the next step and the next order.

He paced behind her again, maintaining eye contact the whole time via the mirror. “It's funny, isn't it,” he continued. “So much has changed since the days of Big Brother, but so much has stayed the same. I've said it to you before. We don't need total control over everybody. We don't need to get inside the head of every little individual to find out what their worst personal nightmares are. We don't need to, because the idea of having your eyes eaten up by rats happens to be good enough for us.”

Modesto reached behind the electric equipment on the table to reveal a cage, with a sheet of cloth draped over it. He placed the object on the near side of the table close to her and removed the cloth to reveal two rats inside, separated by a partition. They were just like in fiction, a pair of bulky, voracious-looking rodents with menacingly sharp muzzles and brownish fur, fighting among themselves to get at the barrier separating them from the outside.

“I don't need to tell you what it means, do I,” he went on, his voice an unchanging monotone. “You're the scholar here. You know about the constant fear of losing one's eyes and how it's linked to the castration complex. From Oedipus to Orwell, one of those permanent tropes haunting our collective unconscious.”

Tawny just sat there listening and staring ahead, ready for whatever was going to come. A part of her wanted it to just be over quickly, if this was going to be it. But another part of her held out wondering about all the questions she didn't know the answers to, wondering about Louis.

Modesto stood still and looked at her reflection in the mirror again. He then walked slowly up to the mirror, not taking his eyes off hers the whole time. He turned to face her and took out a switch from his pocket. He turned the switch to reveal a two-way mirror, the image of the two of them in the room suddenly giving way to a view into the room next door. A prisoner was seated on the other side in almost symmetrical fashion, strapped to a metal chair in the middle of the room with a table behind it. He was dressed in an all-white protective suit and his face covered by a metal cage attached to it, but she immediately knew there was only one person it could possibly be.

“It's simple,” the officer went on, in his same methodical tone. “For you, the worst thing in the world is if it happens to your husband. Your greatest love, your most precious thing in the world. It would destroy you more than any kind of physical pain. Seeing it happen right before your eyes, powerless to do anything about it, and then living the rest of your life with the consequences. That's the worst thing that could ever happen to you, isn't it. And it's about to happen right now, with the click of a button. So sit back and relax, professor. You're at the movies, sitting in front of the big screen, and there's nothing else for you to do.” He raised his hand toward the switch, the same intent look in his eyes, not even losing a moment to flash a contemptuous smirk.

A flurry of thoughts whizzed through Tawny's head, the distress signals blaring full blast. There was no time to think about what it all meant, just a matter of split seconds to do something, anything, and it couldn't be more obvious what. She knew there was only one thing she could do, only one body she could thrust between herself and the ultimate horror.

“Do it to me,” she blurted out. “Do it to me. Do it to me, and just let him go.”

She had said it three times, as if just for good measure, and every time, it had come out more calmly, more evenly. She just sat there, looking her captor straight in the eye. For the first time since getting here, she could feel her heart racing, as if a switch inside had gone off. She had done it, finally taken that step, but now everything depended on what the opposing move was going to be.

Modesto stood still with his eyes locked on hers, his other hand still raised up to the switch. “I'd be careful what you wish for,” he said, somewhat quizzically, and then walked out of the room.

*

Tawny sat there, her eyes locked to the other side of the mirror. The figure in the white suit sat there motionless, the calm, upright pose mirroring hers, the cage still attached to the head. She knew it was Louis in there, even though she had no way of making out his physical appearance. She knew it because her instinct told her so, because she knew him better than anyone else and could practically recognize him in her sleep. It had been a few minutes now since Modesto had gone out, but nothing had happened yet, at least not for her to see.

She then saw Modesto appear in the adjacent room and walk up to Louis. The officer took hold of the cage and removed it, revealing more of the white protective suit that completely covered over Louis's face beyond view. As if on cue, the view on the mirror switched again, showing just the reflection of herself and the room she was sitting in. She quietly let out a deep breath, seeing the danger averted for now, at least to the extent that she could see for herself.

She sat there looking at her reflection in the mirror, waiting. Of all the reflections of herself she had ever seen, this one was somehow different. It was still the same face, the same gaze, the same look in her eyes, but boiling inside with a surplus meaning that the mirror, with all its trickery, couldn't contain. She had said those words without hesitation, with no doubt in her mind about what she was setting out to do. This was the outcome she had been willing to accept all along, and yet it left her with an odd feeling of emptiness that she herself couldn't explain.

The cage of rats was lying on the table right behind her the whole time, right where Modesto had left it. The rats kept moving about restlessly inside their cage, growing more and more impatient. Tawny let out an inner sigh. Behind that look of cold stoicism in the mirror, she could almost see the inner conflict brewing, a part of her trying to come to terms with her own selfishness by feeling sorry. Sorry to Louis, her parents, everyone she knew she was going to hurt by doing what she was about to do. It had been her choice to let it get this far, by refusing to budge until the stakes had gotten too high. It had been her selfish choice in the end, but those who loved her for who she was knew she wasn't going to act any differently, and all she could hope for was that this knowledge would mitigate as much as possible the pain she was about to cause them.

The door finally opened and Modesto walked back in. He strolled up to the table, almost casually, and put on a pair of gloves. “So this is what it's come to,” he mused. He looked up at the mirror and into her eyes. “The kind of things you would do for love. You'd do anything for him, wouldn't you? Even though you can't even know for sure that he's the one sitting there.”

He rested his fists on the table and leaned in slightly, speaking from right behind her, their eyes still locked in the mirror. “Every great intellectual has an irrational weakness,” he sighed. “That's what it is, irrational. You'd give up everything even if there was just a 0.1% chance that it's actually him in there. You'd give up your own life, even though you know how much that would destroy him.”

A patronizing smirk appeared on his face. “He must have told you so many times how you mean the world to him,” he went on. “How he'd be nothing without you. It's not hard to guess, really. We've gone all the way back to your junior high records. He was the little troublemaker who even got you in detention from time to time, and you were the beautiful soul, the artist and the poet who changed everything for him. It's like something straight out of a fairy tale, isn't it. I didn't even think Disney wrote storylines like that nowadays.”

Tawny just kept staring blankly back at him in the mirror. For all the melodrama, he was playing to her weaknesses with ruthless efficiency, even if it was going to take more than just that.

“It's too bad we're not on Disney Channel anymore,” Modesto said. “Let's not be kidding ourselves. You're never going to see him again with your own eyes. And you're never going to stop hearing him blame himself for it, for the rest of your days. So much for love, eh?”

He finally took hold of the object in front of him. The rats jumped up in anticipation as the cage holding them was lifted from the table. He brought the cage up to her face and turned it around to reveal the mask-like opening designed to fit around her eyes. Such a simple construction it was, just like in fiction.

He stopped again for a moment, with the mask a matter of inches away from her face. “I've never seen two eyes quite like yours,” he mused, taking another good look. “So full of mysterious energy, the piercing look in those eyes. You won't even be half the person without them.”

Tawny said nothing. She could feel herself suppressing the slightest smile, a smile she herself couldn't explain. It was the touch of finality in his voice, signaling that this really was it. It was the knowing smile of the condemned at the executioner, the knowledge that there was nothing he could do now to disturb her inner peace.

Modesto attached the cage to her face, the mask fitting just right onto her eyes, and fastened the band holding the device together around her head. All that remained now was for the lever to be raised. All she could see in front of her now was the partition separating her eyes from the rodents waiting restlessly on the other side.

_Louis_ , she spoke in absolute silence. _Louis, everything's going to be okay. I promise._ She just sat there and waited, her eyes closed shut.

*

Tawny was lying on her back next to Louis on an endless green field, gazing up at the starry night sky stretched out in all directions above them. The stars had never felt so close as they did now, almost as if they could fall from the sky and crash into the earth any minute, the beauty of their faraway light morphing into the most wanton destruction. And the more they seemed to inch closer, the more she felt drawn to the light, even if it might be the last thing she would ever see. She could feel the strangest urge to just close her eyes and surrender herself to the unstoppable force headed toward them, trusting that somehow, somewhere, the two of them were going to end up in one piece, together, in a world only they could ever know, reserved for them in a special corner of the universe.

She looked over to Louis, making him look back at her in turn. He just smiled, making her smile back at him, until it suddenly dawned on her. She looked intently into his eyes, the blank expression on her face trying to tell him a thousand things at once. She was imploring him to go, to leave her there alone, promising to come find him afterwards. And he understood, as he always did, as she knew he would. She smiled again and closed her eyes, reaching out and taking hold of his hand just in time for it to dissolve into hers and melt away, little by little. She could feel him as close to her as ever just as he was pulling away, away from this little patch of earth below the stars where she needed to be all by herself for just long enough until it was all over.

She kept her eyes shut as it all came closing in. But she wasn't alone, a hostile presence making itself felt next to her, refusing to turn away. She was still waiting, strapped to the chair in front of the table and facing the mirror, the officer standing next to her with his hand poised on the lever.

“Don't you ever get afraid of... anything?” Modesto was asking her, in a suggestive tone.

“Just get on with it,” Tawny answered, a touch of impatience in her voice. Her body was absolutely still, almost floating in a state of suspension, but her mind lingered behind as it recognized the distinct familiarity of those words, recalling, just for a split second, the conversation in the car the other day. She could feel herself scrambling to take control of the memory of that day as it flashed by in the moment of danger, refusing to let it hold her back just when she had taken the leap.

There was a screeching noise and everything blacked out into darkness.

*

Tawny lost track of time as she remained seated on that chair, her body remaining motionless the whole time. It might have been minutes, hours, or just a split second. But it didn't matter. She knew that something wasn't right, that somewhere, something in the cosmic order of things hadn't gone her way. She tried to recover her bodily senses and put herself back together, bit by bit, as she had done so many times before. But as her arms, legs, mouth, and everything else fell back into place, one by one, she found herself desperately trying to keep her eyes locked in that state of suspension, as if not wanting to face the reality until it would be forced upon her like a yoke around her neck.

Just then, she could feel the cage being lifted from her face, the darkness giving way to a hostile light. She opened her eyes to find Modesto staring intently at her, a smile on his lips that told her everything. He was smiling at the sight of her eyes squinting before the light, those eyes that otherwise seemed so full of energy and assurance. It was the sight of those eyes being forced open into a reality they didn't want to be in, with no way out in sight.

He took the cage in his hands and then circled behind her, putting it down with a slight thud on the table, the rats still jumping around inside it in frustrated anticipation. She looked up into the mirror, her eyes still struggling to adjust to the light. It couldn't be, she thought to herself. But it was, and there was no closing her eyes to the reality of what had just happened.

“You really are something else entirely,” the officer announced in a low tone, looking intently at her in the mirror. “You should have seen your face the whole time. Let's just say I don't think there's ever been a happier prisoner in the history of Room 101.”

He then took the switch out of his pocket and turned it, the mirror again giving way to a view into the adjacent room. It was Louis again, strapped to the chair in the middle, dressed in the white protective suit, but this time without the cover over his head. It was Louis with his face in plain view, the look on it ever so calm, as if trying to mirror hers even though she knew he couldn't see her. The look sent an instant flash of despair all the way down to her innards as she realized what it all meant. A guard on the other side walked up and attached the cage onto his head, blocking it from view once again.

“You're not afraid of anything, are you,” Modesto went on. “At least not for yourself. The only thing you're afraid of is what might happen to your husband. It's that simple.” The knowing, cynical smirk returned to his face. “You'd rather have your eyes eaten alive than use them to see it happen to him. You'd rather have all the pain in the world inflicted on yourself instead of seeing it done to him. It's touching, really. But we happen to have just the right kind of punishment even for you.”

Tawny blinked her eyes in quick succession, her heartbeat starting to race. This can't be happening, she thought to herself. She would have given anything, at least from her own flesh and blood, for it to not happen. But it was too late now, because she had already given herself away in the absurdest, most reckless way possible.

The smirk on Modesto's face only kept getting deeper as he read the look of desperation showing itself, if only ever so slightly, on her face. It was game over, and there was only one thing left for him to do.

He took one more look at her as he shifted his fingers onto the switch. “You should have compromised when you had the chance,” he said in a low tone. “You don't have anyone to blame except yourself.”

Modesto pressed the button. A click sounded on the other side, the silence so intense that the slightest click could be heard like a thud across the two-way mirror. Tawny just wanted to scream and try to wrestle herself away from the chair, even though she knew it was no use. But her eyes, her mouth, the rest of her body froze into place as she beheld the man she loved just sitting still as the blood streamed ever so slowly down his face. Nothing came from the other side, just absolute silence. No Louis scream, none of the child-like instinctive reaction to pain that any human being would have been making in that situation.

Tawny bit her lip, her jaw beginning to tremble. The tears forced themselves down ever so tortuously down her cheek, as if trying to mirror the thick riverlets of blood flowing down his. It was the most intense kind of pain ever, as if pieces of her heart were being ripped out one by one, only for them to grow back and go through the same torture all over again. It was the sight of Louis putting himself through it all with such unspeakable stoicism, as if resigned to his fate even though it was all her doing instead of his.

Her eyes filled with water, the view in front of her starting to blur into a foggy storm. But she couldn't bear to close her eyes, struggling instead to keep them open. A desperate survival instinct kicked in, the bonds and wires attached to her suddenly reminding her of her own vulnerability and the futility of trying to wrestle with them. Her duty to Louis now was to stay alive and in one piece as much as possible, to live to tell the truth of what happened here and not, for even a second, take her eyes off it.

She blinked her eyes in quick succession, fighting off the burning sensation of those tears. Louis just kept sitting motionlessly on that chair, as if was the same scene playing itself over and over, in tortuous succession. The blood dripped slowly off his face and onto the floor, the mask hiding everything else from view. _Why_ , she thought to herself. Why did he have to be the one suffering for all the things she had done. But there was no answer and there couldn't be. That was not least what this whole torture was about, and confronting the reality of it was the first step that needed to be taken.

As if on cue, the guard on the other side finally made his way toward the chair. He removed the cage from Louis's face to reveal the mutilated, blood-soaked remains of his eyes, just long enough to etch themselves like a sharp needle into her memory, before Modesto turned the switch again with one click.

Modesto, who had been observing her the whole time, now paced in front of her as the mirror switched gears, forcing himself into her field of vision. He was looking intently into her eyes, deep in observation, without even a hint of triumphalism.

“He's going to be treated with antibiotics,” he finally said, as matter-of-factly as ever. “After that it's up to you to take him home and live with the consequences, for the rest of your lives.” He paused, as if to let all that sink in.

“It's time for your lunch,” he announced. “You're a vegetarian, yes?”

Tawny didn't respond, but the officer wasn't waiting for her to. He walked out of the room, leaving her alone to stare at the reflection of her tear-splattered face in the mirror.

*

Tawny sat there in the waiting room, her forehead buried in both hands. How could she have been so foolish, she thought to herself. How preventable it had all been, at every step along the way. How she wished she had done something, anything, with the cage attached to her face, when she still had the chance. She could have at least pretended to be scared, or whatever else it took in that situation. All those years of theater in school, and she couldn't even put up a good act when it mattered. All those minutes, maybe even hours, of sitting there calmly with a poker face on, and she had still let him get inside her head and identify her weakest spot. The problem was that she was an open book, at least for those who knew how to read her, and her poker face had been her real one the whole time, laid as bare as ever to view.

For perhaps the first time in her life, she felt like an abject failure. She had failed at things countless times, of course, but she could always try again and again. But now, Louis's life was ruined and his eyesight gone, forever. There was no way to redeem it now. She had failed him, just when it mattered most. Worst of all, it was her entire life that had been building up to this failure, one single catastrophe where she had only seen an indeterminate chain of events. It was the way she had always lived her life, the things she believed in, the things the two of them had been promising each other over the years. Room 101 was exactly the kind of scenario where they knew they could place their unconditional trust in one another. And it wasn't supposed to end like it did in fiction, for the simple reason that they weren't Winston and Julia, but Louis and Tawny. They had a history, a memory, that went well beyond the darkness of the present and enabled both of them to know the other inside out, better than anyone else, better than any authoritarian state machinery ever could. They had a past they could always believe in, a past that, in each of its moments, they believed would be redeemed by the future.

Worst of all, she knew that she had been tempting fate the whole time. She had been tempting fate by believing too much in herself and pushing herself to the edge, up to the point where she knew she would have to jump off. She had been believing too much in her own ability to step in when it mattered, when push came to shove. She had been putting his life at risk while believing she could compensate for it with her own, and it was something she knew she would never be able to forgive herself for.

She looked up as the door opened and Modesto began walking toward her. He stopped as he stood just several inches in front of her, glancing down at the untouched plate of spaghetti and glass of water resting on the metal tray.

“Looks like it's time to say goodbye,” he announced, in a matter-of-fact tone. “It's been an honor, Professor Dean.”

Tawny rose slowly to her feet, looking him in the eye, her hands at her sides. He offered his hand for a handshake, but she ignored it. His lips turned into an unabashed smirk.

“Not that it matters now,” the officer continued. “But my name isn't actually Modesto. But it is where your mother comes from, I believe. You used to go there with your parents every summer, isn't that right?”

She just stared at him, unfazed. There was little point in assuming they knew anything short of everything about her. That much had already been clear from the beginning.

Modesto, or whatever his actual name was, let out a slight chuckle. “I wonder what you were like as a little child,” he mused. “You must have been so different from the rest of us. But I guess it'll have to remain a mystery. We still don't know anything about your childhood before the age of six. There's just nothing on it. Nada.”

He turned his head, leaving those words tantalizingly hanging as the door opened and another officer stood waiting at the doorway. Modesto turned back to face Tawny, as if for one last time.

“Just remember,” he said in a low tone. “We know what you're up to. We can come for you again anytime, both you and your husband.”

He kept his eyes locked onto hers as he began stepping away, before finally turning and giving the other officer a nod. It took just two seconds for another figure to appear in the doorway, a pair of thick sunglasses placed where his eyes would have been.

Tawny quickly walked up to him, even though he, too, was walking slowly toward her. She held back just as she stood in front of him and put her arms ever so delicately around him, her cheek pressing against his. Her words failed her as she fought back the tears, knowing that he immediately knew all the same that it was her.

“Louis, it's me,” she finally whispered into his ear.

“Tawny,” Louis whispered back, with an unfathomable depth to his voice. “Are you alright?”

Tawny winced slightly as she struggled to process that simple question, not knowing what to say. It was as if her entire faculty of speech was paralyzed, unable to cope with a situation that was too much for words.

“Louis,” she managed to utter the one name, the one word she never had difficulty pronouncing. “Let's go home, okay?”

She slowly drew back from the embrace, looking at his face from close up. He nodded ever so slightly. She slid her right hand down his left arm and took hold of his hand, ever so gradually and delicately, letting him feel the simple motion in its entirety. She then turned just as Modesto gestured toward the exit for them, standing and observing from a distance.

“You take good care of him,” the officer called out, without a tinge of irony.

Tawny walked out with her hand firmly grasping Louis's, her face burning with too many emotions all at once. She tried not to think about anything else but how to get home. They walked through a brightly lit hallway and then stopped at the entranceway as their personal belongings were handed back to them. Both their cellphones were, predictably enough, out of battery. Tawny put her watch back on her wrist, the one that had been taken away earlier that morning. It was two o'clock now in the middle of afternoon, unless the watch had been tampered with or was playing tricks on her.

They walked out a series of doors, the last one finally leading to the outside. As the two of them stepped out, they were greeted by sunlight, the same sunlight that now felt like an eternity ago. Tawny looked around, trying to find her bearings. This clearly wasn't the entrance they had been led through last night, but none of that mattered now. They were on the outskirts of town, good enough to have a chance at catching a cab nearby if they got lucky.

Tawny started walking, her hand still firmly grasping Louis's, even though she had no idea where. Just follow the main road until a bus stop or a taxi stand comes up, she thought to herself. She felt the urge to just keep moving and get out of the area, however much she felt like an idiot for it. She still didn't say a word, quietly hoping that her steady pace answered his question as much as it could, telling him that she was fine physically and doing what she could to get them on their way home.

Tawny spotted a taxi cab coming in the direction of traffic and went over to the edge of the road to flag it down. She let out a sigh of relief as the vehicle pulled over. “We're going to take the taxi home, okay?” she whispered to him as they walked up. It pained her to say those words, just the mere fact of having to say them. She always liked to say certain things to him just for the pleasure of being able to say them, even when he didn't need her to because he already knew.

The driver kept glancing at them in the rear-view mirror as they drove off. Tawny kept her hand discreetly holding onto Louis's, looking toward him every now and then. She could imagine the driver's perplexity at the absurd sight of a blind man accompanied by a woman with bloodshot eyes and a haggard but expressionless face as if nothing had happened. If only he could know, she thought to herself, gazing out the window. If only they could all know and believe all the things that had happened in the last fifteen or so hours. It was the stuff of fantasy, an outlandish story that only the most perverse of minds could have drawn up. The officer with the fake name, the psycho-tricks, the setup in Room 101 – it was all about getting at her, and yet in the end, it was Louis who had to make the ultimate sacrifice and go through the kind of primitive torture that defied even the wildest imaginations of contemporary American prisons. All they were left with now was the truth of what actually happened, but it wasn't going to be easy finding anyone who would believe it.

Tawny took note of the streets they passed by, trying to reconstruct the path back to where they had come from, as much as it probably wasn't even going to matter. There was nothing about it that needed to be hidden, except for the one or two rooms safely tucked away in the corner of that police complex and the hardly believable story that unfolded there. Nothing else about it was an especially compromising revelation on a regime that preached national unity and always seemed to get away with claiming to do whatever it took to safeguard it. At the end of the day, there wasn't anything that the people going about their daily business outside didn't already know.

She squeezed Louis's hand more tightly as they finally approached their home. He looked toward her, an uncannily knowing, penetrating look through those thick shades. It was always the same look, with or without the shades, the same something in it that was now tormenting her just as it could normally fill her so easily with joy.

“Thank you,” she said to the driver as she paid up. She placed her hand on Louis's hand and then got out, before helping him out of the car. She then took his hand in hers and started walking. Her head started buzzing with all the things she needed to tell him before going inside, like the fact that their apartment, car, everything else was probably bugged. But she somehow couldn't bring herself to speak and just kept on walking, as if trying to at least keep up appearances if nothing else.

They walked up the stairs, Tawny just looking straight ahead and avoiding eye contact with Louis. The tears started flowing again down her cheek, silently, though she sensed he knew it all the same. She tried to keep her pace as even as possible but could now feel it speeding up ever so slightly, enough for both of them to notice, having internalized the same motions so many times.

She finally opened the door and let Louis inside ahead of her, holding onto his arms on both sides. As she stood there behind him, seeing everything just as they had left it, she suddenly realized she had no idea what to do, where to begin. She dropped to the floor, running her hand down his arm along the way, and started untying his shoelaces for him. The tears streamed down her face as her fingers moved vigorously through the laces, trying to finish doing at least this one little thing for him before she broke down completely. But her tears moved too fast, falling in droplets onto his feet just as she finished removing the shoes off them.

“Louis,” she whispered as she grasped at his legs and finally wrapped her arms around them in a desperate embrace. “Louis...” Her voice drowned away in her tears as she gasped for breath. He lowered himself gingerly to his knees on the floor, breaking away from her embrace just enough before putting his arms around her, knowing exactly where she was in front of him.

“Louis,” she started again in between her tears, grasping at him tightly and desperately, her words failing her again. She felt utterly incapacitated, like a little baby realizing for the first time that she had to express herself in words but not knowing how.

“Tawny,” Louis whispered in her ear. “It's okay.” There was an unfathomable depth to his voice, an infinitude that somehow wasn't from this world. He felt her delicately, his hands moving across her back and onto her shoulders and neck, as if trying to feel her ever so familiar presence in its wholeness. She could feel a smile forming on his cheek right next to hers, etching itself onto the skin on her face.

“Tawny,” he whispered again. “Will you dance with me?” Before she could answer, he had raised himself to his feet, and her along with him, sliding his hands down her arms and into her hands. She looked at him for a moment in disbelief, the pitch black of his shades telling him nothing and everything at once.

“Okay,” she just whispered back, almost without even realizing. She suddenly wanted nothing but to surrender herself to the graceful touch of his hands and voice, guiding her ever so gently along and freeing her from her paralysis, one step at a time. It was always the same voice, the same warmth, the same unmistakable touch that was always there, no matter what else was or wasn't also there.

“Just a moment.” Tawny gently extricated one of her hands from his and walked both of them over to the counter of their living room, taking hold of the remote control for the stereo. She turned on track number one and put it on repeat. It was the rumba song they both knew so well, the first song they had ever danced to together many years ago.

Tawny positioned herself behind Louis and placed her hands on his shoulders as the song began. He swung around and took both of her hands in his, the two of them now facing each other, as the music transitioned. They both knew every step by heart, without even having to look at each other. After all these years, it was still the same one, the same tune they had danced to at Zach Estrada's house party back in seventh grade. Their arms and legs moved in perfect unison, not missing a single beat as the music flowed ineluctably, oblivious of everything else around them.

Tawny closed her eyes as the song started over from the beginning. The sweet melody and the graceful interplay of their motions merged into the darkness in front of her, and the darkness eventually into light, as it always did. It was like they were dancing on air, the only thing holding them up the unsinkable force of their interlocking hands.

She kept her eyes shut, the tears flowing again down her cheek. This time, they were tears of the pain being slowly overcome, being dowsed in a feeling that was beyond words. How many times they had danced to this tune ever since that day, how many times they had managed to find delight in it, every single time, over and over.

“Tawny,” Louis whispered gently in front of her. This time, it was a different depth that emanated from it, signaling a transition. Their hands and feet kept moving in lockstep, the words starting to flow seamlessly through the gaps between them.

“They told me you betrayed me,” he whispered into her ear, the words hitting her like an electric shock in between the music. “They told me they placed the same cage on your head, and you begged them to do it to me instead. But I knew it wasn't true, Tawny. I know you inside out, better than anybody else. You begged them to do it to you instead, didn't you. But they didn't let it happen.”

“Louis...” Her voice came out as a whisper and then dissipated in her tears. Her hands and feet stopped in their tracks and she placed her arms around him, clutching him tightly as the two of them stood still in the middle of the dance floor. She almost wanted to not tell him the truth, just to make him realize that there was nothing great about what she had done.

“You were too strong for them. They knew they couldn't lay a finger on you. You offered to give yourself up, but they knew the only way they could hurt you was by hurting me instead.”

“Louis, I tried.” _And I failed_. She knew she wanted to say those words, but they somehow wouldn't come out.

“You're an angel, Tawny.”

“What?” she whispered in disbelief.

“You're an angel.” Hearing those words twice just multiplied her pain, even though she had been the one asking for it. Louis went on, his voice full of assurance. “This is how I've always known you. Always willing to sacrifice yourself, out of pure love. This is how you've always been. But God couldn't let it happen to you this time, because He needs you for so many other things.”

“Louis... Stop.” The tears gushed out of Tawny's eyes. She closed her eyes and put her arms more tightly around him, almost as if to stem the words coming out of his mouth. _Louis, listen to me,_ she wanted to say. But her words failed her, drowning in her tears before she could even begin to say them. If only she could make him see, just look into the mirror, and realize that he was the one who had made the ultimate sacrifice, not her.

“Tawny.” Louis's whisper sounded ever so confidently, almost as if taunting her own inability to speak. “I could see everything.” His voice had the ominously contemplative tone of an old man on his deathbed, ever so calm and knowing. “Just as they took my eyes out, I could see everything laid out in front of me. One long chain of events. The first time our eyes met, when I was lying flat on my back on the school lawn that day, and looked up to find an angel standing right there. You were the first person in my life I looked up to. You were everything I could have ever asked for, all in one person.”

Tawny kept her eyes shut and just listened, the tears no longer flowing, her arms no longer trying to resist.

“And it's incredible to think how you could love me so much, of all people. It's incredible to think anybody like you could ever exist. It's like my life has just been one long fairy tale, and what happened today only proved it. All the sacrifices you were always ready to make, just so that we could be together. Like that one time, back in eighth grade, when you chose not to go to SACCY...”

Louis's voice finally cracked slightly and came to a stop. But she could feel his lips forging themselves into a smile, full of conviction.

“I made a promise to myself that day, Tawny. I promised myself I would never make you make a sacrifice like that again. I promised myself I wouldn't be the one holding you down, but following you up, wherever you went. And so we made it to college together, and I got a job while you went to grad school. It's my proudest accomplishment, being at your side with every step instead of getting in your way. And as I sat there with that metal cage on, I was at absolute peace with myself, knowing that you weren't the one having to make the sacrifice. I was only doing what I could to be worthy of you.”

Tawny winced in pain, the tears coming back out, this time in thick droplets. It was the strangest kind of pain ever, producing an intensely burning sensation that gnawed away at her heart.

“How can you say that, Louis?” she finally said, letting out a weak whisper.

“Because it's true, isn't it?”

Tawny let out a sigh. The numbing pain inside kept getting bigger and bigger, and with it the sheer scale of everything she had done and was now responsible for.

She swallowed and managed to put her words together. “An angel would have never asked you to make a sacrifice like that,” she whispered into his ear. “Or put you in all that danger in the first place.”

“It was my decision to follow you all the way there, Tawny.” His voice came out ever so calmly, ever so confidently. “And you were still willing to give yourself up to save me from my own actions. You went to almost divine lengths to keep me out of harm's way.”

“Louis...” Her words were failing her again, unable to produce anything but the helpless gesture of imploring him to just stop.

“Tawny, it's okay.” Louis ran his hand gently across her neck and onto her shoulder. He felt her shoulder ever so delicately, feeling the pattern of her bones that he knew down to the last detail.

“The beauty of it all is that I've never expected too much from you,” he said. “I know you're not an angel with actual wings. I know you're made of flesh and bone, just like everybody else. There's no science fiction about it. No superhero capes. There's no secret to your strength except the endless love and wisdom human beings are capable of. If angels existed among us, this is how I'd want them to be like.”

Tawny remained still, trying to fathom what he was saying but finding herself unable to. The depth in his voice kept drawing her in, into a world and an abyss she wasn't ready to confront.

“I know it's just fantasy,” he continued, full of assurance. “But we can never truly escape fantasy, right? You're the one who taught me that. I know the fantasy is just covering up the void, helping me make sense of a world that I wouldn't understand otherwise. And now, after all that's happened, it makes every sense in the world.”

“Louis,” she finally said. “I don't know what to say.”

“You don't have to, Tawny,” he replied, his voice full of assurance. “You don't have to know. All you have to do is just be what you are. And I'll always be the luckiest guy on the face of the earth.”

She closed her eyes, not knowing what to say. It was all too much. It was somehow all too much, but something had to be done. Everything hinged now on somehow channeling all this excess energy into believing that something could be done, for him and the two of them, before it might be too late.

She kept her eyes shut and took a deep breath.

*

Tawny glanced at her watch. It was already seven o'clock. They were sitting on the floor of their living room, their backs against the counter, contemplating and staring into space. At some point, the music had stopped, leaving them with an empty silence and the knowledge of each other's presence, in spite of everything else.

She placed her hand over Louis's and gently ran it up toward his forearm, as if to let him know that she was still there, even though he already knew. She then reached across the counter for the remote and turned on another track from their audio player. She took her phone from where it had been charging on the counter and took a deep breath. She had no desire to look through all the e-mails she had missed since last night, but she knew that she had to, sooner or later.

She opened her inbox and went through the unread messages. There were so many of them, but her eyes guided her instinctively to the one that mattered most. She skimmed through the e-mail and then read it more carefully one more time. Somehow, there was nothing about it that surprised her, except maybe her own failure to be surprised by it.

“Louis,” she finally said. “I've been suspended from the university.”

“What?” he whispered in disbelief, barely audible between the music.

“They say I missed an important faculty meeting today, and then didn't show up for class without any kind of notice. I mean, it's true,” she added, almost nonchalantly.

“Fucking bastards,” he snapped under his breath, his eyebrows curling in anger. She looked at him for a moment, slightly surprised at the intensity of his reaction to this piece of news, of all the things that had happened to them since last night.

“Look, it's okay,” she said, placing her hand again over his. “I'm going to stay right here and take care of you.”

“Tawny, listen to me,” he replied, putting his hand on top of hers. “I want you to find a way to get back at all the bastards who did this to you, and to me. I want you to tell the world about everything that happened since last night. I know you can. You, of all people, can do it better than anybody.” He bit his lip. “And don't worry about the consequences. There's nothing more they can do to me after all that's happened. I'm telling you right now that what matters to me most is you getting the truth out as soon as possible.”

Tawny locked her eyes onto his, letting those words sink in. It was obvious what she had to do in this situation, and all it took was for him to say it. He was giving her a blank check to fill out, with all the implications it had.

“I promise you, Louis,” she finally said. “I promise you I'll find a way.”

Louis nodded, the intensity giving way to assurance. How easy he could make things sometimes, even with the hard part still to be done. All she had to do now was get going, with no time to lose.

“I'm going to go make dinner, okay?” she said, running her hand up to his forearm.

He nodded again and smiled slightly. “Thanks, Tawny.”

*

Tawny led Louis to their bedroom, holding onto his arms from behind with both hands. She looked down at their feet as they walked slowly in unison, trying to feel the magic of every step along the way. Her long white nightgown stretched down to her bare feet as they marched along silently. She stopped as they reached the bed and helped him onto his back, just enough for him feel his way through the rest.

She knelt down on the floor next to the bed and took his hand with both of hers. She placed her forehead gently against his, trying to let him know she was there as much as possible, and closed her eyes shut. How she wished she could just give him her eyes, turn the vision in her eyes into his. How she wished she could have done something, anything, so that he didn't have to go through what he did. But it was no use wishing now, with all the work still left to be done.

“Good night, my love,” she whispered ever so softly. Louis inhaled deeply but didn't say anything. She remained in that position for a moment, her eyes still shut. There was only one thing she had set her mind on doing that night, as much as she wished she could just stay there with him and not think of being anywhere else. She opened her eyes, slowly extricated her hands from Louis's and rose to her feet.

She made her way out of the room and toward the study, as quietly as she had come in. She sat down in front of her computer and took a deep breath. How many times she had been here late at night, working on something that had to get done before dawn broke. All she had to do now was do it one more time, coax one more night's work out of herself after having barely slept the night before. Maybe this was the only possible way to do it, almost as if parts of it might get lost if she allowed herself to sleep. The last 24 hours had been one long trek through darkness, and all she had to do now was put everything into words and send it on its way to the outside world, using the one contact she had in the international press just when she needed it most.

She buried her eyes in her hands, trying to think. It was an impossible task, setting out not only to describe the indescribable, but redeem the unredeemable. This was about trying to find some kind of meaning in the most mind-numbing horror there was, to salvage the hope that all the things that had happened somehow weren't in vain. This was about making the story not just be about two people and their problems, but a wider political struggle that was only beginning, even though there was ultimately no deeper meaning to Louis's suffering and couldn't possibly be. Her job now was somehow to construct that something out of nothing, the stuff of fantasy that this whole story had already been to begin with. That was all it was going to take. No more, no less.

She opened her eyes again to find the blank Word doc in front of her, the cursor flickering invitingly with the same incessant blink.

She started typing, the words finally starting to flow.


	5. Chapter 5

“Tawny?”

Tawny opened her eyes to find Louis sitting on the grass, his right leg outstretched gingerly on the ground, a look of affectionate concern on his face. She was lying on her back on the field next to their tent. She still felt no pain, as if it had all been magically spirited away while she had her eyes closed. It must have been just a matter of minutes or even seconds, though it might as well have been half a lifetime that had whizzed by without her realizing.

“How's your ankle?” she asked, raising herself to a sitting position.

He smiled slightly. “It's going to be okay,” he answered. “Thanks to you.”

She rose to her feet and headed into their tent, nudging him gently on the arm along the way. She let out a sigh of relief as she found everything as they had left it there, spared from the downpour for the most part. She took a fresh hand towel from her backpack and handed it to Louis, who had delicately shifted his way inside, his outstretched leg still in position.

“You first,” he said softly, almost in a whisper.

Tawny took a moment to press the towel ever so slightly against her face and then handed it to Louis again, who proceeded to dry his face and hair with it.

As he was finished, she took the towel back and rolled it up. “This will have to do for now.”

She placed Louis's right leg over her lap, resting it in an elevated position, and began applying the makeshift bandage over his ankle.

“Thanks, Tawny,” Louis just said.

“You don't have to thank me, Louis,” Tawny responded in a somewhat subdued tone. “I just did what I had to do. Both of us would have done the same thing in that situation.”

She looked up as she finished to find him looking intently into her eyes. There was an intensity about it that couldn't be captured in words, the two of them just sitting alone in that tent, trying to process what had just happened.

“I guess you did owe me that one,” Louis finally said, keeping a straight face. “I saved you from the Evil Twitty that one time, remember?”

Tawny began to chuckle, but managed to hold back. The sparkle in his eyes kept drawing her in, but she kept telling herself in her head that it was all just a dream. It was just a dream and they were about to wake back up, or somebody from the rest of the group was about to show up at their tent and ask them, none too amused, where they had been the whole time.

“I think this is the part where I say you're my hero and I kiss you,” Louis went on, finally breaking into a smile.

Tawny smiled back. The memory of that day came rushing back, together with a thousand other memories that started merging, one into the other, little by little. The memory of promising him that she will forever be his friend as she lay tied to the railway, showing him just how easy it was to be a hero, at least to her. The memory, and the sensation, of Louis leaning in and kissing her, making her understand everything in the easiest way he knew how. She closed her eyes. It was all just a dream, and she was about to wake back up when it would all become too much, when reality would come knocking and take her back to where she needed to be.

*

Tawny opened her eyes and looked at the computer screen in front of her. The clock on the lower right corner of the screen read 7:01 AM. The article in front of her was all written, waiting only to be sent. It was just a blink of an eye ago that she had finally gotten to the end of the last paragraph, virtually dragging herself across the finish line. She speed-read the article from the beginning one more time. Almost ten pages of running text, somehow pieced together in the space of one night. She went to her e-mails, the message she had drafted earlier that night waiting only for the attachment to be added. It was 3 o'clock in the afternoon in London, and if she was lucky, it was going to get read before the end of the work day there. Attach file, click, send. She went through the motions in one swoop, almost as if to make sure it was done before anything else could happen.

Just then, Louis suddenly appeared at the doorway of the studio, his faint footsteps having escaped her attention the whole time. He had found his way there as if by sheer instinct, knowing that that was where he would find her. Tawny sat still, not knowing what to say to him, as he casually stood there, resting his arm on the adjacent wall.

“Louis,” she finally said. “It's done.”

Louis just nodded. “I know,” he just whispered. “You're the best, Tawn.”

Tawny rose from her desk and walked up to him, putting her arms around him before he could say anything else. “Will you dance with me?”

Louis didn't say anything, but she didn't need him to. She took hold of his hands and walked the two of them over to the counter of their living room. The stereo was still there, as was the remote, which she used to put on track number one. They started dancing, their arms and legs moving in unison again. Tawny closed her eyes and went with the flow of the music, letting the familiar motions take over.

The thoughts flowed inexorably through her head, in between the music. She didn't know what to do, where to go from here. They were effectively trapped within their four walls, in an apartment full of bugs, with nowhere to go. She was without a job and he had little prospect of finding one ever again. The article she had sent out just now was their only hope, but also potentially their death sentence. If the authorities were serious about tracking what she was up to, they were going to show up again before long. Just how long was the only question.

“Let's get out of here, Tawny,” Louis whispered in her ear.

“Where to?” she whispered back.

“Anywhere but here.”

“Let's go back home for the weekend, to my parents' place.”

Tawny let out an inner sigh. She couldn't begin to think how she would face Eileen and Steve or what she would say to them. But the only thing she wanted right now was to defer to Louis's wish, whatever that happened to be.

“Okay,” she finally whispered. “Shouldn't we call them first?”

“Let's just go,” he replied. “Will you be ready in an hour?”

“Of course,” she said back. “I'll get breakfast ready once this song is over, okay?”

She could feel his lips forming into a smile on the cheek next to hers. “Thanks, Tawny.”

*

Tawny climbed into the driver's seat of their car. She looked over to Louis, sitting there calmly, his seat belt already strapped. She fastened her own seat belt and placed her hands on the steering wheel. She quietly took a deep breath, trying to gather herself. It was at least four weeks since she last drove and fifty hours since she last slept, for all intents and purposes. And yet, that was somehow the least of their worries right now. She was ready to drive this thing as long and far as she had to, as if that was all there was to it. And that, in a way, was precisely the problem. There was no use pretending, no use trying to go through the motions as if this was any other trip home.

She reached across and placed her hand gently over Louis's. Why does this have to be so difficult, she thought to herself. All she had to do was defer to Louis's wish, which was just what she was doing. And yet, it was this urge to defer that was playing with her mind, turning into an urge to defer the inevitable, to defer and hold off the moment of truth that wasn't going to resolve anything anyway. Their lives were going to go on and on like this, and there wouldn't be much his parents could do for them. She had led the two of them down the path of living like fugitives, prisoners in their own home, a home they would have to return to eventually once the weekend was over. Facing his parents and telling them everything that had happened wasn't going to change any of that. Nothing she did now could make up for everything that had happened. Nothing.

She quietly let out another deep breath and glanced at her watch. It was barely nine o'clock. It wasn't going to make a difference now if they arrive in two hours or four. At the end of the day, she knew she was being selfish. But maybe, just maybe, it offered a way out, even if just for a few hours.

“Louis,” she finally said. “Can we make a stopover on the way?” She knew that her words had come out rushed, her voice lacking its usual steadiness.

Louis said nothing. He was clearly deep in thought, probing the depths of her heart, latching onto every little hint in her voice. He knew her inside out, better than anybody else. He was going to make this easier for her by doing what he did best, just by understanding her so easily.

“Our little paradise forest,” he finally said, his voice ever so calm. “Senior camping trip. It's on the way, isn't it?”

Tawny locked her eyes onto Louis's, his eyes somehow speaking to her through the pitch black of the shades covering them.

“It's a slight detour,” she replied, the steady calm in her voice now mirroring his. “We should be there in an hour and a half.” With that, she turned on the ignition and lowered the handbrake, her hands and feet putting themselves in motion.

*

Tawny drove in silence, trying to focus on the road ahead. In a way, this was madness, driving on two full days of sleep deprivation. But she knew that there wasn't anything else she would rather be doing if she had her proverbial last day to live, and that was good enough for her.

She shifted her hands every now and then on the steering wheel, trying to keep her senses alert. Somehow, she had been here before. Such a simple task, and yet everything hinged on approaching it as if she was doing it for the first and only time. It was always the same feel, the unmistakable touch, the same 2006 Elantra they had pooled their money to buy during senior year of high school and shared ever since. Louis sometimes joked that it was their only child, insisting that he wasn't even going to think about getting another car until this one literally dies on them. And now, all they needed from it was to make the trip they had made so many times before, with just a stopover on the way added in.

Just a stopover on the way. She let out an inner sigh, recognizing the futility of the whole exercise. In a way, she didn't know what to expect. They hadn't been there ever since that senior camping trip, even though it really was just a slight detour from the path they took so often. They had the memories of that day, as vivid as they could be, and yet it was all emanating from an utterly different world that was now lost forever.

“You know,” Louis's voice cut through the silence like a razor. “It's been a while since we've been to a baseball game.”

Tawny took a moment to reorient her thoughts. Louis still had that uncannily steady, contemplative tone, with a certitude in his voice that the banality of those words struggled to contain.

“You mean the only time we've been to one,” she replied. “It's already been five years since we saw Twitty pitch in Double-A.”

Louis let out a deep breath. “I miss everything about it,” he said softly. “We'll have to go back if he ever makes it to the majors.”

Tawny just kept looking straight ahead. Somehow, she could feel Louis's gaze reaching her over those thick shades, even if she couldn't look back at him.

“Remember when you got a foul ball and then gave it to the little boy sitting next to us?” Louis chuckled. “It took me a while to get over that, you know. That was our souvenir, and you just gave it away. But you were just being how you always are.” His voice trailed off.

Tawny remained silent, just trying to drive. Tears flowed silently down her cheeks, her jaw beginning to tremble. She desperately tried to pull herself together and focus on the road ahead. She couldn't do this to him, couldn't break down now, of all moments, when both of their lives were literally in her hands at the steering wheel. When he trusted her and believed in her so much that even if she were to drive both of them off a cliff right now, she would still be an angel to him, the one guiding him all the way to the afterlife. This whole drive was turning into a slow torture, and yet she felt the strangest wish for it to go on and on, if only so that there would be no other reality they would have to return to once it was over. How she wished she could just put herself through it over and over, for Louis and the two of them, if that was all it took.

She quietly let out a deep breath as they finally neared the campsite. So this is it, she thought to herself. In the middle of all that had happened in the last few days, this was their little detour, their long, winding path leading them to a distant corner of memory lane, neatly hidden away as if nothing had changed all these years since their last visit.

Tawny pulled into an empty side lot. It all came back to her, little by little. She knew where to go from here, at least to the extent she could be sure of anything right now. She parked the car and turned off the ignition. “Louis, we're here,” she announced.

She looked over to Louis, sitting still next to her, still contemplating. She too remained seated, her seat belt still on. She was going to give him as much time as he wanted and let him dictate the pace of things. It was surely the least she could do in this situation.

She took the phone out of her pocket and opened her inbox. She scanned the list of unread messages and clicked on the first one, the only one that mattered. She speed-read the message and then went through it one more time, slowly, as if just for good measure.

_Tawny, I've just finished going through your article. This is a story that needs to go out. I'll release it for publication and send you the link later tonight. Take care. Yours, Valerie_

Just then, another message popped up. It was from Twitty, addressed to both her and Louis. A message as if from another world, oblivious of all that could have possibly happened in the last few days.

_Hey guys, hope you're doing ok in the middle of all that's going on! I wanted to share some big news with you: I'm starting a comeback as a pitcher. I ran into a scout the other day after a pickup game and he says I still got it, maybe enough for a fasttrack to the upper minors. You guys are the first to hear about it, since I owe a lot to you both. You guys always inspired me to keep going and never give up, ever since that one time in seventh grade. Will keep you posted – got a lot going on right now but hear from you soon! And don't forget you promised to come watch if I make it to the bigs ;-) -Twitty_

Tawny just stared at the screen, having read the text a second, third, fourth time. She then started to well up as she thought about what it all meant. But the tears somehow stopped halfway out of her eyes as she looked out the windshield and toward the stopover place that lay ahead, the place they had come all the way here for.

“Shall we go?” Louis finally asked, his voice cutting through the silence like a razor.

Tawny put the phone on standby and stared for a moment at the reflection of her face on the black screen. “Yeah,” she replied, no trace of hesitation in her voice.

*

Tawny hurried over to the other side to help Louis out of the car. “I'm alright,” he said softly. She shut the door behind him and then grasped his hand with hers.

They stood there for a moment with their hands held, looking around. Louis had his face turned upward, taking in the forest-scented air mingling with the sunlight. Tawny followed suit, closing her eyes and trying to picture the path that lay ahead. It all came back to her, little by little, the path to the campsite and the forest. The air they breathed and the words they exchanged, the snapshots from a past that was so far away and yet so palpable, waiting to be grasped right in front of them.

They started walking. Tawny clutched Louis's hand more tightly, as if trying to let him know where she was and where they were headed, even though he already knew. She was going to have to be his eyes from now on, to the extent that that was even possible. She thought again about how they had gotten here, trying to resist the temptation to expunge from her head everything else that had happened after that day. It was one long chain of events, one single catastrophe whose moments just fleeted by, taking on a whole different meaning from where they now stood.

The memories kept coming back to her like a long-lost dream. How they snuck out after breakfast to spend time together just exploring and lost themselves in the woods, chancing upon the most gorgeous gorge adorned with lush green shrubbery and singing birds. It had all felt like a dream at the time, but it was somehow all too real, the dreamy sequence laced with the awareness that they were living out a fantasy, in the middle of that forest.

They walked on. It was the stuff of fantasy, an outlandish story that only the most fanciful of imaginations could have drawn up. The two of them sitting on that rock just taking in the picturesque delight, exchanging the words they did, then the sunlight turning into thunder and rain just in time for that freak accident. And then Tawny with her little makeshift act, doing her best impression of _The Little Engine That Could_ all the way back to the campsite.

Tawny chuckled slightly at the thought as they neared the campsite. It was completely empty, with no trace of campers or anyone else in sight. The eerie silence was reminiscent of what greeted her when she woke up, or thought she woke up, from her little doze that day, lying on her back in the middle of that field. They were completely alone on their little patch of earth for those few moments, the rest of their group nowhere in sight. The two of them tending to each other in the tent, trying to process everything that had happened, and then the rest just a blissful blur.

They walked on in silence in the direction of the forest. The silence was only interrupted by the sounds of nature, the foliage brushing against the occasional breeze mixed in with the calling of birds. They really were completely alone, almost as if the wooded theater had been set up in anticipation of their arrival that day.

They walked and walked, taking in the forest environment through all the senses available to them. Tawny could feel herself resisting the urge to just close her eyes and let some kind of automatism take over, her legs walking themselves deeper and deeper into the forest, taking them where they needed to go. All they had to do was keep following memory lane and they would reach Sacramento eventually, the house from Louis's childhood where his parents still lived.

Louis stopped in his tracks as they approached an elevated side section of the forest. Tawny would have kept on walking, even though she knew exactly where they were, but willingly obliged.

“This is it,” Louis said. “This is the place.” He looked around, trying to find his bearings. Tawny said nothing, just looking at him patiently.

“You really saved both of us that day,” he mused. “You walked a mile through the rainstorm, carrying me on your back.” His words came out with what might have sounded like disbelief, but she knew him well enough to know that it wasn't.

The two of them just stood there, their hands firmly held. Tawny knew that Louis wanted to walk up to the gorge and take in the surroundings again, but something in her kept driving her onward, onto the path they never ended up taking that day, the detour in the forest that had been cut short by the rainstorm.

“Shall we go?”

He looked toward her for a moment. He then nodded, readjusting his feet in the direction of the path that lay ahead, as if instinctively. She smiled ever so slightly and started walking, clutching his hand more tightly.

The forest kept drawing her in, the same feels coming back all over again. Just a stopover on their way back home, and yet it all felt so tantalizingly close. It was like the dream of half a lifetime whizzing by in just a split second, but everything in between happening all the same, just like the entire history of humanity compressed into a mere fraction of a second within the history of all life on earth. They had been living all along in the fantastic reality of a world that could only give meaning to its existence by telling neat little stories, however outlandish they were, and all it took now was the most fanciful one of them all. All it took was the belief that somewhere, some place on the other side of that hill was where Louis's parents were, waiting for them back home even though they didn't know they were coming.

Tawny kept looking straight ahead, keeping her pace as even as possible. She knew that something wasn't right, though she couldn't exactly say what. They were completely alone, so much so that practically nothing and anything could happen to them. It occurred to her that she had no idea what she was doing here, in the middle of this forest, and yet they both somehow knew. It was both of their hearts that had led them here, converging into one, as they had done so often. And she knew what it was that she had to do, if that was what it was going to take.

Without losing a second, she stepped in front of Louis and put her arms around him, trying to shield his body with hers, her back now turned toward the direction they had been walking. “Louis,” she whispered and closed her eyes.

There were loud bangs and everything blacked out into darkness.

*

“Tawny?”

Tawny's eyes remained shut. But she could feel the darkness in front of her merging into light, a blinding light that shined right through. The voice breathed flesh into her bones and formed her lips into an instinctive smile. She was holding onto Louis for dear life, as if everything might dissolve and melt into air if she let go. And yet, she knew he was right there and could feel him as close to her as ever, the vision in her eyes finally becoming his, the blood in her veins flowing into his.

“Tawny.” The voice sounded again, this time as a whisper. There was a certitude in it that couldn't be contained in words, an overflowing intensity that gave her the strangest, if oddly familiar, kind of reassurance. It was always the same voice, the same warmth, the same unmistakable touch, the same miracle that made itself felt with every step. It was as if he could see her again, as naturally as ever, right there with him, on the same path they had always been together, hand in hand.

“We should get going, Louis,” she whispered back. There was nothing more to be said. They had made it this far and there was nowhere else to go. They were just making a stopover on their way back home. On the other side of that hill was where Louis's parents were, and all their parents. All she had to do was keep believing and following the light, the light that shined through every storm and never failed her. She looked up toward the sky, her eyes still shut, and took one last deep breath.

***

_For Tawny Dean, who doesn't and can't exist, but a little bit of whom exists in all of us_


End file.
